Where We Start To Notice The Pattern Of Grizzlies On Display And We Get To See The “Sheldon Car”
Part 2 of Day 2
Yesterday’s lunch was literally nothing to write home about, but after lunch we wandered along the street and stumbled across the “2nd Street Gallery”: a mini mall with interesting shops and self-announced “musher museum”.
As is tradition, we couldn’t resist buying some art from a local artist – possibly these items will become trivets, though we’ll just figure that out when we get home.
We took the lift up to the second floor for the Musher’s Museum – except the museum was up another 7 steps that I declined to climb.
Andy went up and saw a couple of interesting things:
On the way out, I felt obligated to take this photo:
Unfortunately, Andy didn’t have his music with him, or he could have shown off his skills.
Also in this mini-mall was a Romanian/Moldovan restaurant. Considering out lunch experience was less than stellar, we decided to come back later to have dinner there.
At 3:00, we joined some of the people on our tour in the lobby for a meet and greet with our local tour guide, Jade, and the American Cruise Line representative, Andrew. They handed out our packets with info for the coming days, and explained how things will work for the next week. The goal is to replicate the ship environment while on land – after today, all our meals would be taken care of (a question we had). Everything sounded promising!
Around 6:00, we walked back across the street for dinner at the Romanian/Moldovan restuarant. Andy ordered a traditional Moldovan dish called Mamaliga and I had a beef rib with potatoes, carrots and pickles. They were both excellent and made up for the lackluster lunch.
Day 3
Today was “Getting To Know Fairbanks” day. Our original concerns about being shown the local Home Depot and McDonald’s blessedly did not happen (though apparently Fairbanks’ Home Depot and McDonald’s are the most northern in the US).
First we went to the Museum of the North, which had excellent exhibits of Alaska’s history, going back to pre-historic times.
This is Otto, the second display of a brown/grizzly bear.
This is a settee made of dall sheep horn, caribou antler, and fake leather. I’m not sure if this looks comfortable or not. I’d be concerned about being poked by an antler.
Upstairs was an art gallery. One piece was a highly entertaining outhouse.
No guarantee of privacy even with the door closed.
We also watched an interesting 30 minute video on the Aurora Borealis. Apparently the Aurora season doesn’t start until mid-August when there’s enough actual darkness to see it.
Our next stop was lunch. Jade (our local guide) kept saying that they were taking us to the best restaurants that Fairbanks had to offer in an attempt to duplicate the ship experience, but somehow I got the impression that maybe this restaurant might not live up to that standard.
Andy enjoyed his roast beef dip sandwich, but my garden salad with chicken was fairly tasteless. The chocolate mousse pie was fabulous, though.
Next up was a close up and personal visit with the Alaska pipeline. This originally didn’t sound particularly interesting, but it turned out to be more impressive than I thought it would.
Apparently this is the traditional pose, akin to holding up the Tower of Pisa:
This flower is called a fireweed. It has all of a two week season in the Alaskan summer, and we lucked out to be able to see it.
One more stop before heading back to the hotel was an antique car museum. Once again, it was more interesting than we thought it would be. All but 3 of the cars in the museum actually run and are driven upon occasion. All of these cars are impressive – some of the cars from the 1930s are HUGE (e.g. the Packard). My favorite car, though, was the “Sheldon Car”.
We know for a fact that we can’t possibly be related. Though we wondered whether changed his last name to Sheldon from something unusual as is the case with Andy’s dad.
This guy was a big deal in the Alaska car community.
There was one car that people were allowed to and encouraged to climb into:
This was our last stop for the day. Dinner was at a restaurant about 15 minutes from the hotel. We both had the halibut, which was very good.
On the way back to the hotel for the night, we received our final instructions for packing up and leaving our luggage outside our door by 7:30 tomorrow morning.
Theoretically, we’ll have wifi in our Denali lodging, but as is tradition with national parks, cell service will probably be close to existent.
Tomorrow, the real adventure begins! Who knows – maybe we’ll be lucky and catch a glimpse of Denali in all its glory!
Maryland Meshugas 