In our cabin notebook, Jutta listed some places that have shower options. The first had free showers but you could only go during the open swim times... not good for us. The second option was at a laundromat and you had to pay $6. Lonnie and I decided to save a bit of money and only pay for the shower once. $6 gets you 10 minutes worth of water. Lonnie went first, I think that girl only took like a 2/3 minute shower. When she came out and told me it was my turn there was still 6 minutes left and she had clothes on. I managed to shower and get out with 58 sec left.
It was a little awkward. We were just blowdrying our hair where people are washing their clothes. But I'm glad for that shower.
I can't say I was feeling my best this day. We didn't go to sleep until 5:30am because we were watching the northern lights and Jutta wanted to meet us at 10:45. So, not much sleep. Then straight to taking showers without any food or coffee.
We went to Little Richard's Diner for breakfast and I ordered reindeer sausage. It was pretty good, and pretty greasy. Maybe not the best thing to put on the stomach but as the day progressed, I started to feel better.
Sadly, I took no pictures of the laundromat or the sausage.
The cabin we were staying in was in North Pole, Alaska. We were really excited about this. The description of North Pole on their Chamber of Commerce page says the "streets are decorated year-round with a cheerful display of holy, candy canes, lights and names that evoke the Christmas Season." I was expecting something very different than what I saw. The thing is, this place is exactly how they described it. A lot of the streets have Christmas themed names and there are light and sign poles that are candy cane striped and that is it. It is, unfortunately, not cute at all.
The big thing here is Santa's house. We went there.
North Pole is claiming this as the largest Santa statue in the world. I haven't checked the facts to see if this is right. He's checking his list but his eyes are looking a little funky. And look at that booty.
Santa's House
This place is totally Christmas crazy. They're playing Christmas music, there is a santa here year-round (of course he was on vacation while we were there), there are ornaments, and funky little gifts. It smells like Christmas here.
And you can even sit in Santa's chair.
You can also walk around their grounds and see reindeer (some of the only livestock we've seen) and there were huge pieces of ice that we believe were from ice sculptures that were melting.
Here I am posing with these huge blocks of ice.
When we left Santa's House, we headed out to find the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline is 800 miles long, starting in Prudhoe Bay and going all the way to the northernmost ice-free point in America, Valdez. About 420 miles of the pipeline is above the ground due to permafrost. It took only 3 years to build. Its kind of mind blowing to me. They had to make it where the oil moves freely, doesn't freeze, also the warmth of the oil doesn't affect the ground in certain areas. It was a huge feat to pull this off.
This is the point that my phone died with 20% of battery. Phones were the biggest weakness of this trip. And the thing is, this isn't the first time that my phone died while we were out, away from the cabin. Why I didn't bring a charger for the car that morning, blows my mind.
But as Lonnie and I have already proven, we are super resilient. We pulled out of map and started to think of a place that we could grab a happy hour drink and something small to eat. On the back of the map, I see something that says "BEER" in all caps, written huge. I read the description and find out that right down the road is northernmost brewery in the U.S. If my phone hadn't died there is no way we would've found it.
So we headed the mile and a half down the road and found the brewery.
The brewery glasses say
"FAIRBANKS:
Where the people are unusual, and the beer is unusually good."
We also ordered a huge, really different plate of nachos. Was supposed to be a snack and turned into dinner.
This was our last full day in Alaska and we were a little sentimental as we sat eating and drinking that afternoon. Partly excited too, though, because this would be night 2 of watching the northern lights.
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