July 4th, Fairbanks

We ate breakfast in the hotel, the had a nice buffet with reindeer sausage, my new favorite breafast meat. Included in the tour was a riverboat cruise. I guess I had pretty low expectation, but it really was nice. We left the hotel at 12:30 and arrived at the river just a few minutes later. Again, a gift shop. Shortly after we ate family style, beef stew and potatoe soup. After lunch we boarded the riverboat. We had a seaplane demonstration and a dogsledding demonstration before arriving at the native fishing village. At the fishing village we learned about native dress, housing, and fishing. It was all well orchestrated and very interesting. We returned to our hotel at about 5:30. Our one big excursion for the whole trip was a flight to the artic circle. When we arrived back to the hotel we went to the tour desk only to find out that it had been cancelled due to bad weather conditions at Fort Yukon. Bummer. To console ourselves we went out to dinner. We splurged on King Crab Legs. They were awesome. Food always makes things better. Our bags had to be in the hallway by 11:00 pm. Packing took a while since we had sent two bags to Fairbanks and had everything mixed up. We finally got everything sorted out. Sunset was at 12:34 am with sunrise at 3:40. There were people out playing basketball at 3:00 am...in the daylight. There was a full moon, but it like the fireworks didn't work as well in the day light as it would have at night, but it was clear and you could see Denali from our hotel room. It was beautiful.