In the 1st photo, Barbara is talking to Jay on the Skype phone. This campground has free Wifi that allows us to use the USB connected phone on the notebook computer. This has allowed us to have phone service all through Canada. Only Version and Alltel work in Canada and at roaming rate of about $1.25 a minute.
In the third photo is the gold that I panned. After weighting, it amounted to about $21.00 worth.
In the 4th or last photo, Barbara is holding a $40,000 gold nugget mined from a local mine a few years ago. They didn't allow us to take it.
Hello Blog
I am behind in my blog updates. It is easy to fall behind because we have been busy from sun up to sun down, and that is about 20 hrs a day. We try to get about 7 hrs sleep, but it is hard to sleep when the sun is shining in the window at midnight. We purchased three windshield sun blockers at Walmart and fitted them to our bedroom windows yesterday. That really helped.
We are in Fairbanks at the Chena River State Campground. Very nice and affordable, it is located in town on the treed banks of the Chena River that runs through the middle of Fairbanks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chena_River The campground has some hookups, but to save a little money, we chose the dry sites as we don't really need the hookups.
Yesterday we did a few of the popular tourist sites. The first one was a trip to Fox, an old historic gold mining town about 12 miles north east on highway 2. This is a gold mine that is still operational using a water and sluthe seprater. The mine is called a "drift" mine and they allow the public to pan for gold. We panned and were rewarded with a small amount of gold. Not really nuggets but gold grains. In any case it was fun and valued at a few dollars that we did not have to declare. The second was a 3+ hour stern wheel riverboat trip down the Chena that was fun and educational. We were happy with both.
Today was an day to do laundry and some general planning as to the rest of our stay in Fairbanks. Our plans call for visits the Georgeson Botanical Gardens , the University of Alaska Museum of the North, and the Large Animal Research Station. These are all located on the University Campus only a few miles from our campsite. We also will visit the Pioneer Air Museum. We also planned our time and route to Denali National Park, about 130 mile southwest toward Anchorage.
Stay tuned, we may head for the Arctic Circle to check the weather, aren't for sure, yet. We would take Highway 11 north on to Coldfoot and Wiseman.
John
This is a link, to the routing that we followed getting here. We are at the 5K mile mark because traveled a lot of extra miles while in Banff and Jasper with Jay.
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