On our prior visits
to Fairbanks, our family had taken the Discovery Riverboat Tour, visited the
Alaska Pipeline and panned for gold at Gold Dredge #8. We enjoyed all of those activities, but Alan
and I felt no need to do any of them again.
Honestly, I was looking at Fairbanks as a reprovisioning stop, and the
only other item on our “must do” list was to visit Pioneer Park. Pioneer Park is sort of a living history
museum. And a park (with a playground, a
carousel and mini-golf). And home to a
performing arts center. And you can
“camp” in the parking lot. Yup, that’s
all it is, an honest-to-goodness parking lot.
Nothing but spigots with potable water and public restrooms in Pioneer
Park. If there was a trash dumpster, we
couldn’t find it, yet we called that parking lot home for four nights. Because we packed in so many activities (some
fun, some not so much) into the three full days we were in Fairbanks, I may end up breaking our stay down into two posts. We’ll see how it goes. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though.
Long-time readers
know that Alan and I often arrive at a destination with a scavenger list of
sorts. Sure, there might be a museum to
visit or a restaurant to try, but sometimes there are simply unusual items on
the list that we just want to see. That
was the case on the day we traveled from Denali National Park north to
Fairbanks. We wanted to see the Nenana
Tripod. And we weren’t going to leave
Alaska until we did.
