Not surprisingly we slept in this morning! We had slpet to late for the hotel breakfast so ate the last of our muffins and coffee to get the day started. We needed to sort out our tings which we’d just dumped on the floor before crawling into bed at 4 am last night, but eventually around 11.30 we headed off to drive down the highway to… the North Pole! Well, technically it is the City of North Pole, Alaska. 🙂
North Pole’s claim to fame is , naturally, Santa’s house. It’s a very popular spot to visit, the house is white with red stripes ( like a candy cane) and is decorated with christmas themed murals. Of course there is a “Big Santa” and a huge Christmas tree out the front and inside they have a vast array of Christmas decorations and other Christmas themed bits and pieces to purchase. There is a cafe and behind glass you can see Santa’s workshop and of course you can have your photo taken with Santa and Mrs Clause – any day of the year! I loved it 🙂
It was a 15 minute drive back to Fairbanks where we thougt we’d take a look at the “Downtown” area. To be honest fairbans doesn’t really have much of a downtown! There are no higrise and it doesn’t really seem to have a central feel at all. We did pass a nice “Welcome to Alaska” mural though.
We decided to check out one of the Fred Meyer stores in town. The Fred Meyer chain of superstores can only be found in the Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska and we hadn’t previously visited one. It had some similarities to Walmart but a little more varied – we could have bought a lounge suite if we’d wanted one! We picked up a few bits and pieces and then headed back to the hotel for a quiet afternoon, we really were pretty tired after our late night and wanted to catch up on our blogs and processing photos. I had shot all the images last night in RAW format which has to be post-processed before you can use them ( unlike Jpegs). It was nice to have a chilled afternoon before we strolled back over to Pikes landing for another tasty dinner.
The sune has come out this afternoon, we’re hoping the weather holds for us tomorrow when we head back down south to Denali National Park.
