Fairbanks

We made it to Fairbanks! We didn’t really have a plan of what we needed to do in Fairbanks as all the things we knew that we wanted to do we’re slightly outside of town, so we ended up camping at Pioneer Park. It was really odd to be staying in a literal parking lot after spending a couple of days in a national park, but whatever. We were right next to a couple of playgrounds and that is the boys really needed.

Gabe even made a few new friends, although he never found out their names... Pat was talking to the other dad when Gabe came running up to him and told him to take off his cap. He did and Gabe yells back to his new friends “See! I told you he didn’t have any hair!!”

Yesterday morning we packed everything up and headed to the North Pole. We’d mentioned the possibility of going to the North Pole and Gabe got super excited that he might get to meet Santa Claus’ wife. Not Santa Claus. He wanted to meet Mrs Claus...

He forgot all about her when we actually got out there though. The first thing we saw was the giant Santa Claus statue and Josy was so excited that he nearly jumped out of my arms. He wanted nothing to do with the actual Santa...

From there we drove up to Chena Hot Springs. Um, I think we could have spent our entire week up here... But I’m getting ahead of myself. On the way up we actually saw a moose! It was the first wildlife we’d seen other than squirrels, which is crazy given the fact we were in Denali. Naturally, I made everyone get out of the car to take a picture...and naturally they all made this face.

Chena was amazing. There was a lot of stuff that I would have loved to do, but with limited time and small children, priority went to the hot springs. As it was, kids weren’t allowed in the actual hot springs, so Pat and I got to rotate who played in the pool with the boys and who got to sit in the hot springs. Luckily the boys thought the pool was so much fun that they didn’t care that they were missing out.

After dinner, Josy was toast. I mean, you can’t really blame the kid. He’s sleeping in a room with everyone, not napping nicely and he burned a bunch of energy swimming. So he went to bed before I’d even finished my dinner. Gabe was also toast, but we’d promised him s’mores. We’d been truly this whole week, but between not having marshmallow sticks, not having a leatherman to cut a stick and not having firewood, it hadn’t happened yet. But last night all the pieces came together so we could actually do s’mores and we had to do them, even though certain little people were so cranky that they should have gone straight to bed.

Unfortunately, Pat had a terrible time getting the fire started. I’m not sure what was going on, but it did not want to light. And Gabe was devastated because Daddy was using a piece of cardboard that he wanted to save to turn into a rowboat. And as soon as the fire was finally going and we were getting the s’more stuff ready to go, it started raining.

It’s a good thing they tasted good because those were hard fought s’mores. And Gabe was in bed the moment he was done eating. He actually may have still had food in his mouth when I put him down. And he woke up much happier with life...