Our "leisure"
day, meaning we had no planned tours. We slept late (8 am), had
an ordinary breakfast involving omelets and pancakes, then decided
it was time to try the "on the road" website uploads.
We looked at the various ways to accomplish this before we left Mother New Jersey, and decided to buy a phone card and use it to connect to our isp back home. We had a terrible time getting a connection. We discovered a previously-unseen error message "can't find router path." Seems you hafta go through a whole lotta computers to get from Alaska to New Jersey. The best connection we could get was 19.2 k. It wasn't too bad using ftp to update the website, but e-mail caused the connection to break four times. What we thought would take twenty minutes took three hours.
We had to get the rental car back by 5, so we made a quick tour of Fairbanks, visited Alaskaland (a park full of historical buildings, lots of crafty shops, a genuine sternwheeler, a steam train, and lots of stuff that didn't open 'til after Memorial Day).
We also checked out the University of Alaska (very nice campus) and visited their museum. It's small but nicely displayed (above photo is from one of their wildlife dioramas).
If we hadn't rented a car (and after leaving it in a parking lot for eighteen hours yesterday, we questioned this choice), we would have gotten a ride from the airport to the hotel. After returning the car to the airport, we had no way back but taxi. Another $20 outa the vacation kitty. And we had to return it full of gas, and gas is $1.78 here, North Shore oil fields not withstanding.
The high today was 54. The low was 32. But it was sunny, unlike the past two days. Sunset tonight is ten minutes before midnight. It never really gets dark, just sorta twilight 'til sunrise two and a half hours later. Thoroughly screws up your perception of the passage of time.
Alaska's four seasons: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Tourist Season.
Now we gotta try this remote isp access thing again.