Thursday the 27th: Fairbanks, Alaska
Managed to see a few things in town on a small budget: the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska and the iconic Alaska railroad. Unfortunately, there's not much to do unless you have the big bucks here. Trips to the arctic circle are about $300 a person (drive in on a tour bus and fly out). We could drive the 200+ miles ourselves but chickened out after reading that it basically ruins your car and you're pretty much guaranteed at least one flat tire on the unpaved road.

The Museum of the North was an interesting place, interpreting Alaska's history and culture. It also had a decent collection of local art. The new building was completed a few years ago (a major addition to a much smaller musuem built in the 70's). Definitely forward thinking for the area. The architect wanted the structure to reflects glaciers in the mountain ranges.

The Alaska railroad:

We've decided to move on to Denali National Park for the next few days and hope for a better experience.

A few things to note:
- The sun sets after midnight and makes it a little hard to sleep.
- Alaska has its own time zone, four hours before the east coast.
- Everything revolves around oil here.
- Long distance bicycling is everywhere, in the Fairbanks Miner (local newspaper) there was a story about a cyclist starting a trip at the top of Alaska this week with the goal of ending up at the bottom of South America...our trip is nothing compared to his. Plus, he was in the paper after a wolf chased him on his bike near the arctic circle....crazy.

Forgot to mention, if you have a PC and the latest software, you can check this link out. It's a web cam of this year's salmon run. We visited the worlds longest wooden fish ladder in Whitehorse (Yukon, Canada) but unfortunately, the salmon had not reached that point yet. Right now, the sixty plus thousand fish are traveling through the Fairbanks area. May want to check the link on August 1st or 2nd, when they are making the final leap to their spawning lake.

http://www.yukonenergy.ca/community/multimedia/fishcam/