Tag: Fairbanks
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Interior Alaska, Part 8 (Memorable Signs)
I’ve discussed a range of attractions from Interior Alaska in the previous seven articles. Today I’m taking a more lighthearted approach. Oftentimes I encounter fascinating, memorable or amusing signage, and for some reason I like to take photographs of them. So here are some of the best examples that highlight and illustrate the trip. Alaskan…
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Interior Alaska, Part 5 (Coldfoot)
I’ve always wanted to travel north of the Arctic Circle. I came pretty close to it in Iceland but even there I fell a few degrees short. So this was a major objective of the latest journey. My wife got her half-marathon in Fairbanks, I got my arctic visit, and we both shared our bucket…
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Interior Alaska, Part 4 (Parks Highway)
Fairbanks is by far the most populated area of Interior Alaska so it made a great base for launching day trips. Our first adventure led southwest on the Parks Highway. I assumed Denali National Park and Preserve and the Denali State Park influenced the highway’s name. However, it actually referred to George Parks, an Alaska…
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Interior Alaska, Part 3 (Greater Fairbanks)
Eventually we ventured away from downtown Fairbanks and started venturing towards the edges of town. Now, to be certain, Fairbanks isn’t a huge town so the “edges” were pretty close. However, I didn’t have enough room to cover everything in the last article so I had to draw a line somewhere. For this purpose I…
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Interior Alaska, Part 2 (Downtown Fairbanks)
We rented an Airbnb house in the historic part of Fairbanks. However historic doesn’t necessarily mean old because Fairbanks only goes back to the beginning of the 20th Century. So a lot of the earlier structures are 1930’s or 1940’s wood-frame homes. A lot look older than their age. The elements are harsh in Interior…
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Out of Season
A strange sight confounded my older son as we walked through a warren of shops near the Santa Fe Plaza during our recent New Mexico trip. He spotted a year-round Christmas store. It didn’t register on my mind until he pointed it out, I guess because I’d seen plenty of them before. Although, as I…
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Warp Drive
Somehow Warp Drive slipped past my attention in the recent Drive Me Crazy article, a collection of several creatively-named streets such as Line Drive for baseball stadiums, Disk Drive for an information technology company, and Doctor Drive which became a study in redundancy. Reader Michael Hollinger rightly noted my omission of Warp Drive in a…
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Extreme Differences of Extremes
I was encouraged to see that I wasn’t the only person fascinated by weather extremes in So Hot, So Cold. Reader “zxo” had been thinking along similar lines a few months ago and created a series of related maps. One of those compared the differences between the highest and lowest temperatures recorded in each state.…
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Split the Name Again
In the first installment I discussed various Louisiana Parishes that shared the same root name, differing only by the addition of an east or a west directional prefix. I noted that sharing of county or county-equivalent names in this manner was surprisingly rare in the United States. The only other place where one sees this…