fourth, fifth, sixth real days of vacation
Fourth day quiet. Breakfast at the B&B, and then a better, more satisfying breakfast at the Sourdough Cafe, where I talked Anami into getting the Sausage and Egg plate, so I could try the caribou (reindeer) sausage. Rudolph tastes pretty good.
Rest of the day spent hanging out in coffee shop and doing a little light shopping - book store, that kind of thing. I hacked a little pygame. Boy am I rusty.
Fairbanks is hosting the World Clown Association's annual convention, and the clowns arranged for a special performance by A-lister Kenny Ahern. He does this strange combination of acrobatics, mime, physical comedy, and stunts. He works with kids a lot - the cuter the better. He balances chairs and 12' step ladders on his chin. He juggles while walking up and down ladders. He plays with flaming dinner plates, and he can fold himself up to fit in a suitcase. What can I say? It was like spending the evening inside an Orisinal game. Something like Tea Time or Bugs. Oh, and he can play the clarinet while walking around on a pilates ball.
Fifth day, up early, quick unsatisfying breakfast, and hit the road out to the Chena Hot Springs resort. On the way out saw some really neat huge snow plowing equipment, shopped for snack bars at a quaint general store. Got to the end of the road (literally) and found a place to park, and went to the poolhouse to buy passes. Changed into swimsuits, stashed our gear in a locker, and headed outside (-15, -20F) down the walkway (20 feet) to the sulphur hot spring (103 - 112F). Soaked. Showered and rinsed, and hottubbed inside. Changed and went for lunch. Rented skis, and Anami took me cross-country skiing for the first time. Not my favorite, but I'll leave room for it to grow on me. Mushing teams buzzed past every 10 minutes or so, in groups of 3. Cute doggies. I fell twice, didn't hurt myself. Anami fell once, but on ice; she got a subsurface bruise in an out-of-the-way place.
Hit the cafe for hot tea and a mocha, but my tea was too hot, so I napped on the cafe couch for 40 minutes while Anami journalled. She woke me just in time to gulp my earl gray and get my boots on to cross the parking lot to the Ice Museum. Formerly the only Ice Hotel in the United States, the cooling system went on the fritz and it melted in 2004. They've since perfected the cooling system, but nobody wants to stay there really, so now it's a museum and workshop for some very talented sculptors. +20F, year round. The team that did the lion and mice sculpture works out of this shop.
There's a bar where you can get martinis - Anami had an appletini in her ice glass. We explored, took a lot of pictures. Most of them didn't come out right - the lighting in there is all LED and dim, and it's very hard for a n00b like me to photograph in.
Then back to the hot spring for a bit more soaking while we tried to decide whether to try the "gourmet" food at the lodge.
Afterwards, we hit the road back to Fairbanks, where we ate a fancy meal at the nice (but not presumptuous) Turtle Club. The food was shockingly good. The Turtle Club is very close to Mt. Aurora, so we headed out after dinner to Cleary Summit to look for the lights again. No luck this time, but the stars were out in force, and the full glory of the Milky Way threatened to swallow us up. I'm getting good at that drive - we got back from the mountain in under 40 minutes, and I don't even remember most of it (oops).
Up to this morning, the sixth real day of vacation. We're so sick of the B&B. Slept in, woke up late and scrambled around to get packed up and out of there by 11. But we couldn't check into the new hotel until 3. Breakfast was coffee, fruit smoothee, quiche and cinnamon roll at a local fancy-pants importing/roasting coffee house. Pretty good. Then a bit of shopping that didn't go anywhere. Park the car near our new hotel and walk aronud downtown.
Today is the first day of a 3-day long series of dog mushing races. They're sprints - less than 30 miles each, and about 20 (?) competitors go out in a staggered start, over the course of an hour. They're timed for completion, and the winner is the person with the lowest overall time at the end of the weekend. We watched a couple of starts today, including Stuart Attla, and did some browsing in local shops. We watched some of the finishers come in, too, and did more browsing until 3. Then we checked into our hotel room, a suite at the Marriot that (thanks to AAA, winter rates, and my Marriot Rewards membership (thanks IU!)) costs $4 less than the B&B.
Quiet evening of cuddling and watching TV, eating pizza near the UAF campus at a place eerily similar to The Slice. Then more TV and bed. Anami dropped off a while ago, but I wanted to dash out a first draft of this post before I started to forget things.
It took forever to get this thing posted; the hotel's internet was down for a long time. But I won't let that get me down. :)