Fairbanks

What a short night it was. We finally received our luggage about 11pm then it was off to sleep. We were up at 5am and in the meeting room at 5:45 for a meeting. we had breakfast, then discussed the events of the day. We had the steamboat river cruise. We saw a plane takeoff and land on the river. It was so cool. We visited with some sled dogs and saw them training by pulling an ATV about a mile. Then on to an Alaskan Indian/Eskimo village. We came back to the lodge for lunch, then off to a Gold mine. We took a tour of a mine and then on to panning for gold. I found $21 worth of gold flakes. Beth was not able to find very much her first time around and was given another bag of dirt to try again. She ended up with $12 worth. We combined our amounts and put it into a charm for a necklace. We then stopped by a section of the Alaskan Pipeline for a tour. It was interesting to see that the platform that the pipe sits on had shifted 6 inches since 2000. It was designed to do that since Alaska has several earthquakes a day. We then took a short downtown city tour since there was not much to see and back to the hotel. We had a great meal at the lodge. I had meatloaf and Beth had steak. We had to pack and must have out bags outside our door by 6am tomorrow. We are off to Denali by train tomorrow. I am looking forward to that. Weather was pretty good today, Temperature was 39 when we got up and ended up in the low 50's. Today's picture is of us panning for gold.