We have a free day in Fairbanks before we meet up with the group we’ll be traveling with for the next six days. We have a meet/greet this afternoon at 4PM to meet everyone and discuss logistics for our Sunday departure.
We don’t have transportation today so we’ll be using rideshare for anything we do today. After a very slow start for the day, Travis does a quick search for a place to get breakfast/lunch and we’re off into the rainy, chilly day. The restaurant is a bit of a dive, but the food is quite good.
Feeling good and full, we get another Uber to The Museum of the North which is on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. It’s not a huge museum, but it does a good job of explaining the history and people of Alaska. We encounter our first bear.
Back at the hotel, we head to the conference room and meet our guide (Cheri) and the rest of our co-travelers for the week. This land package can be done before or after a number of different Uncruise Alaska itineraries and we discover that some people have finished their cruises and others will be moving on to various different cruises next Saturday. One couple, David and Mary, have the misfortune of being stuff with us for two weeks as they’re on our same cruise. All in all, it seems like a good group and Cheri seems really knowledgable and friendly. We head to dinner optimistic about the week ahead.
“Fairbanks is one of the hottest and coldest places in America. The hottest temperature ever recorded in the summer was 99 degrees on July 28, 1919 and the coldest temperature ever recorded in the winter was 66 degrees below zero on Jan. 14, 1934.”