Seeing baby reindeer and musk ox, then a sled dog museum in Fairbanks

American Independence day in Fairbanks

We slept in because I was really sore and tired from all the gold panning. For breakfast we plugged our toaster into the inverter in the car and had toasted bagels. We love to have our toaster along!

First we drove to the Fairbanks Information Center, which it turned out, also has a good sized museum in it. We enjoyed reading about different winners of the Iditarod, learning a bit about oil pipelines in Alaska, and also some native stuff, most of which we'd seen in different places. In the part about native elders, there was a Bible verse one of the elders had put up there, that was really neat.

We went to the Large Animal Research Station for their noon tour, but we were a little disappointed, because the tour was super short, and we couldn't even go up to the fence to see the animals. It is the only musk ox research center in the world, but I'd give it a miss, unless you are really into musk ox and have binoculars. They also had caribou and reindeer there, but all these animals are also in zoos, where you can actually see them. There was an expensive gift shop there as well- musk ox fur/wool is nice, but quite expensive.

Baby reindeer and musk ox video 

Went to the Fairbanks Museum, which was very interesting: there was quite a bit of information about sled dogs and how important they have been in the development of the North, and also a good amount about the Fairbanks flood in 1967: stories of what happened from different people's perspectives, the entertainment program they made to keep people from being bored or thinking too much (which involved a lot of water sports), and a bit about the Klondike gold rush, which we skipped, because we'd seen it at several museums, already. Poor Joshua was so tired, he slept in my arms while I looked at some of the stuff, then Ryan took him and laid him down on some carpet in a small room, where he slept for most of the time we were there. We had the place almost to ourselves. 

There was a huge antler arch at the Info Center we went to in the morning, so we headed back there to look at in and upload videos with their internet, then we drove to a park to let the boys play for a while.

The park was really busy because of the american holiday, and there was a woman preaching really loudly, and singing off key with a couple other people in between. We haven't seen/heard something like that before!

While driving at some point during the day we saw a guy on a little moped doing over 70kmh (45mph) down the sidewalk taking jumps and driving faster than we were allowed to on the road. This is a quick video of him

After supper, we found an interesting laundromat where we planned to wash our clothes and shower, but when we got there, we discovered that while they were open later, they were only open to people who'd already started their showers or laundry for the last hour. In the parking lot of the mall the laundromat was in, there was a strange old man who was campaigning for something or other, we couldn't make it out, even though he had plenty of signs.

When we'd put the boys to bed, people started setting off fireworks all around us at midnight for July 4th, which was really strange, because it was full daylight, and you could only hear them, not see them.