BREAKFAST

On the morning of Day 1, John and I had breakfast just the two of us. The hotel offered a complimentary breakfast in the lobby. Before we went downstairs, I sent Cathy and Karen a text inviting them to go with us but I didn’t hear back until we returned to the room. Cathy sent back that she’d see us later. Better it went that way than for us to hear back, “Yes, we’ll see you down there!” and have to text back that we’d already eaten. That would have been awkward.

In the self-service area, we found mostly prepared packaged food (blech), though they offered a lot of choices. I managed to put together something that was fairly tasty and healthy. A small container of strawberry Greek yogurt from a refrigerator on the counter topped with nuts and dried fruit out beside the steaming pot of oatmeal made a pretty tasty meal. The oatmeal was rolled oats, not steel-cut oats. I find rolled oats too slimy for my taste, so I passed that by, but I was happy to avail myself of the additives they offered to add to my yogurt.

John toasted a bagel and ate half. I took the other half and put butter and jelly on it. Yum. He likes cream cheese on his. Not my style but to each his own, I say.  With nuts-and-dried-fruit-filled strawberry yogurt and buttery-jam-covered half a bagel, I smiled at my happy mouth and full tummy.

We got back to the room from breakfast around 9. I read awhile which aggravated my tired and burning eyes. Maybe it was the smoke, how long I was up the day before, or that I’d forgotten to take my antihistamine the night before (which I took with my morning pills). Whatever the cause of my eye discomfort, I decided to rest them for a while. An audiobook on my phone was just the ticket. Yay, smartphones! I don’t think I fell asleep, but I was down for a while.

WALKABOUT

Later, John tapped me on the hip and asked if I wanted to go for a walkabout. When I opened my eyes, they felt better and I wanted to move around. When the elevator arrived on our floor, Cathy and Karen were on it. “Well, hello,” I said. “Fancy meeting you here. You want to go walking with us?” And they did.

Once we walked outside, I thought it was too cool. “Shoot,” I said, “I need a sweater.”

“You’ll probably warm up as we walk,” Cathy said.

“I don’t know. I think I want to go back and get one.”

“Then go get it and we’ll wait here for you.”

They waited in the parking lot outside the front door. Going back down from the room, I took the stairs instead of the elevator. It was just one floor and the stairs seemed quicker. The door at the bottom of the stairs took me outside along the side of the building though. Whoops. For a minute, I didn’t know where I was or how to get where I wanted to go.

Luckily, the door on that side of the building was close to the front and I recognized the park across the street. I headed in the park direction and found my lovely friends and husband waiting for me. I felt cared for and loved.

Of course, Cathy was right. I took the sweater off later as I warmed up from the walk. I told the group that they’d been right. However, I didn’t want to be cold. I appreciated their waiting for me to take care of myself and my possible needs.

GOLDEN HEART PARK

We walked across First Street in front of the hotel to a pretty park along the Chena River called the Golden Heart Park. The name comes from Fairbanks being called “the golden heart” of Alaska. I thought it was from being the place prospectors took gold to turn it into dollars. Google said it is in the middle of the state and therefore the “heart.” John took this picture of a clock that we heard striking the hour as we walked around the park. It was “donated by the Alaska Rotary Club in 1990 to commemorate their first fifty years of service to Fairbanks and the interior.” (Alaska.com)

It was a nice park. We said hello to a group of three or four men sitting on a bench at the entrance to the park. They had bedrolls and backpacks. Their disheveled appearance led me to think they were experiencing homelessness. One of them was quite drunk, which reinforced that thought. They said hello back. As we walked away, we talked about not wanting to be a person experiencing homelessness in Alaska. People on the street freeze to death during Austin winters and it gets way colder in Alaska.

MORRIS THOMPSON CENTER

We did a loop around the park and then went to the Morris Thompson Center. It was an all-purpose Alaska museum, natural history and all. I went to the restroom and took this picture. I posted it on Facebook with the comment that I knew we weren’t in Texas anymore.

At 10 in a theatre near the entrance, we caught a 28-minute movie about Denali. It was interesting and the shots of the scenery were beautiful. Cathy and Karen went back in the afternoon to catch the 2 PM movie about the Brooks Mountain Range. Cathy told me later that the Brooks Range is the most northern of the Alaskan mountain ranges, “beautiful, stark, and pure wilderness,” she said. When they went, they invited us and we declined. One thing I love about traveling with them is that no one feels obligated to do what the others want to do and no one’s feelings are hurt if you don’t want to go.

Around noon, the four of us walked the three or four blocks around the hotel looking for somewhere to have lunch, but everything was closed for the Fourth of July. The sign on the door of one restaurant read “Due to staff shortages and it being the Fourth of July, we are closed for July 3, 4, and 5.” Okay. The shuttle bus driver had told us there was a parade scheduled and we saw signs of one, but we missed that, too. Since we couldn’t find a restaurant to feed us, we went back to the hotel vowing to eat leftover pizza. Thank goodness we had that.

SHOPPING?

Before we went upstairs, we stopped at the hotel convenience store and bought a small tube of sunscreen (that we never used). I don’t even want to think of the premium we paid for that. I thought Cathy would bring some from home, but she didn’t either. Perhaps we should have communicated before we left. Cathy and Karen bought some other foodstuffs. I also picked up a free community magazine with information about Fairbanks. It had an article about the Chena River and I got a chuckle out of the names of the tributaries, which were: the right tributary, the left tributary, the middle tributary, and the Little Chena. They got the job done.

By the time we got back to the room, I was hungry enough to eat the leftover pizza that was in the mini-fridge. We heated it in the little microwave. John and I joked about how difficult the controls were. He’d managed to get four minutes on the timer when he made coffee that morning and then just stopped it after about two minutes to get the coffee out. I used the leftover time on it to heat up three pieces of pizza. We each had one and split the third. Then I had a granola bar I’d brought from home. That was lunch.

I took another nap after lunch. Traveling the day before must have worn me out, but I felt better after the nap. This is another reason we like to travel on Day 0 and not Day 1. It gives us a slow ramping up to tourist mode and a day to rest from the travel.

I was looking forward to meeting our crew that evening though not so much the Covid home test I was going to have to do in the afternoon.