Thursday, 21 June 2018 – Travel Day to Fairbanks AK

Our site in the RV park. This picture taken at 10:30pm. Still pretty light.
Chena riverfront downtown Fairbanks
Statue celebrating the Eskimo culture on the riverfront

We slept well last night and it was very quiet in this park. It didn’t take us long to break camp this morning and we headed for Fairbanks Alaska. We chose the Riverview RV park just East of Fairbanks based on online reviews. I wasn’t able to call ahead so I just showed up at the park. Only because we were very early we were able to get a 50 Amp Full Hook-Up site. We booked 5 nights here to recuperate from the long drive up the Alaskan Highway. There is a fair amount to do around here and I hope we don’t get too bored. We’ve got a really nice roomy back-in spot but trees keep the satellite from working. We are likely going to run out of recorded shows soon. (cue sympathetic “awww” ). There is good Verizon coverage so Internet works pretty good. The temperature today is a high of 84 deg F. 50Amp electric hook up is nice so we can run the A/C as much as we want. When we are on 30Amp we have to be careful about how much we run simultaneously.
We headed to downtown Fairbanks for lunch. We chose to eat at The Crepery. It was just OK. We shopped a few gift shops and checked out the Chena River frontage. Afterwards we headed to Walmart to re-stock. Even though we found a couple of Walmarts in Canada, they didn’t stock any frozen breakfast sandwiches or other items we have come to prefer. With the Jeep full of groceries we headed back to the coach. We want to be stocked up before we go to Denali National Park. Last time we were there we found very little available in the area.

One item of interest we bought was Bear Spray. Bear spray is a highly recommended item hiking anywhere in the vicinity of bears. The spray is like human Pepper Spray and is proven effective to deter a provoked bear. You hope to never need it. I would have bought some in the US before heading this way but we had heard Canadian customs sometimes wont let you bring it in. I wish we had it while in Canada because we were at some risk. Bear spray at Walmart was much cheaper than many other places I checked, but its still not “cheap”. It will be a nice security blanket while in Denali National Park and Southern Alaska.