We spent Monday, August 31st purchasing souveniers, restocking a few supplies, investigating Fairbanks and resting, so no photos.

On Tuesday we headed out to be tourist! We headed out to a place where the Alaskian Pipeline could be viewed up close. This is an engineering marvel that transports millions of barrels of oil from the north coast of Alaska to the south coast to be loaded on ships. Our next stop was at the University of Alaska - Musk Ox study. This provided us with a few photos of the Musk Ox and a few other animals. Next we headed over to the Pioneer Park which is a small theme park that is open to the public for free. The park is created to allow you to step back in time to the gold rush days. Our last tourist stop for the day was the El Dorado Gold Mine. We took a short train trip and learned about mining for gold. Then, we were given a bag of dirt and a pan to try our hand at panning for gold. Between Jan and I we came up with 19.3 grains of gold. Don't get excited, 19 grains of very small nuggets is worth about $50-$60 and it cost us about $60.00 to take the tour, but it was fun and Jan has a new necklace with part of the gold in it. Next stop was supper, back at Pioneer Park for prime rib and salmon. We are now full and resting! The only thing we will not get to do is go to the Arctic Circle. That would require us to stay another day or two in Fairbanks and spend about 10 hours on a dirt road which is mostly mud right now.

Tomorrow we leave Fairbanks for Denali National Park where we will stay for a couple of days. We probably will not have Internet access until Friday night thus no updates to photos unless we get lucky.