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.
