By Bonnie & Bill Neely
In our RV we had the joys of traveling the road through and around Alaska in summer. We ventured up to Fairbanks where we found a little museum with a fascinating display of a handcrafted miniature creation showing the layout of all the villages and towns along the Yukon River. The patience required to create this perfect dollhouse-sized replica was remarkable. The University of Alaska there was having a demonstration of indigenous games, like a local Olympic tournament. The young adult boys from four Athabascan Tribes were dressed in skins and beads, some with painted features. The emcee explained that the games were to show how the ancient skills of survival in farthest north most frigid land are being preserved by these young people who learn them. The boys seemed to be having fun, but the skills demonstrated were very strenuous. The thrilling games to teach children how to skin animals, build igloos, create fur garments, fight animals, and many other activities that demanded repetition and strong bodies. The actual animals and equipment, which would have been used in real-life work, were not present. The skills, which are fun games for young children, were acted out as fascinting contests. Some of the men told me that even the most high-tech, expensive coats manufactured today for skiing do not keep out the cold as well as the animal skins used in ancient times as the First People’s original clothes in Alaska.
From Fairbanks, we drove to the town of North Pole, Alaska, which, of course, offered envelopes with the return address “Santa Claus, North Pole,” and had the North Pole cancellation seal on it. Parents could buy these and insert a “letter from Santa” and keep them until December to give a child as if it had arrived in the mail. We did not find Santa on his throne, since it was lunchtime, and no children were present. We strolled around the outside of the castle-like building and had the fantastic good luck to see Santa at his back fence dressed still in his red velvet pants lined in white fur, black boots, white undershirt and black suspenders, feeding his reindeer by hand! What a sight to remember and make my childhood dreams and adult Christmas fantasy believable! This is definitely one of my favorite travel experiences!
The midnight sun of Alaska is no myth. We found it fascinating to look out our window at around 3:00 a.m. and see the sun setting, although a yellow-pink glow remained the rest of the night, making it difficult to sleep for those of us not accustomed to it. But it was great to experience, and I hope someday also to get to experience the twenty-four-hour darkness in winter, when the sunlight enters the lowest latitude of the earth. Another very memorable sight we had was the beautiful, fuchsia-colored fireweed blooming thick on the ground beneath a forest which had been decimated by fire. We learned that the seeds of this flower can only sprout if warmed by fire! They provided lush beauty in a vast area of devastation, with charred black broken trunks of trees standing among them.
The date for us to leave with our RV by ferry to Port Rupert, British Columbia, came all too soon. We arrived in Anchorage the day before and went to pick up our tickets for the eagerly anticipated ferry ride on the Pacific Ocean. But it was not to be for us!
To learn the rest of this and many other exciting and hilarious tales, you can order my new book with 5 stars all over the Internet: #RealVentures:DidWeReallyDoThat?! by Bonnie Burgess Neely. This makes the perfect holiday gift for anyone, any age, whether a traveler or an armchair dreamer! My book is guaranteed to keep you laughing and sometimes gasping at our unplanned adventures during which my husband, Bill, drove mileage equivalent to the moon three times or around the Equator 25 time during 47 years of holiday RV travels. You’ll find my book with five stars all over the Internet, E-book or Paperback. Enjoy! And Happy Holidays!
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