North Pole 4th of July

On the 4th of July, we headed from Fairbanks to spend a day in North Pole (home of the real Santa, of course).

North Pole hosts a "Christmas in July" parade on the 4th. It was hot. And the girls enjoyed playing in the dirt while we waited.

Caleb was rocking the summer sun hat.

And then the parade began. This is a pony hauling gigantic rhubarb. Big vegetables are a theme around Alaska. Vegetables grow very large here in the 24-hour sunshine and we're all very proud of that.

We loved the logo on the City of North Pole's police cars.

Everything in North Pole is Santa or Christmas themed. 

The real Santa and Mrs. Claus were the highlight of the parade. The parade ends at the "Santa Claus house" and there are a whole bunch of booths and stuff set up there.

Here's the Santa Claus house. A long time ago, this one family opened a little curio shop of Christmas stuff they collected. And that turned into the entire town of North Pole. So, the shop has expanded. And they now have a gigantic Santa statue out front and a sleigh, and some reindeer. It's the real deal.

Santa, being the cool guy that he is, wore his patriotic flag shirt for the holiday and Caleb loved meeting him. 

This is as close as Sabrina would get. And Celia wouldn't even go in the same room.

We liked Santa's take on the Starbucks logo.

We couldn't go visit North Pole, Alaska without visiting the actual pole. It's in a random park with a plaque that explains its hilarious origin and story.

Again, the whole town of North Pole is on board with the Christmas theme. All the light posts are candy canes, the businesses have festive signs all year long, and all the street names are appropriately named.

We drove back to Fairbanks for the afternoon of the 4th and went to historic Pioneer Park. We got lucky and got to ride the original coal engine they only pull out for holidays. It's the oldest operating steam engine in Alaska, but it's so difficult to run they only do it a few times per year. It was fascinating to see those engineers work so hard (and it was so hot! They let us step behind the controls to take a pictures, but they cautioned us not to touch anything because the controls were over 200 degrees). 

Pioneer park is full of historical stuff from the area. Remember our jaunt to Nenana? Yup. Here's a miniature version of the tripod way back in the glory days.

And also, as we mentioned in the last post, sternwheelers were historically a big part of life in Fairbanks, and here is the largest one they had back then, preserved as a museum.

After the kids were in bed that night we left a baby monitor with the kids and snuck out for a little night out around the hotel grounds to play bocce ball, putt some golf balls, and try to throw rocks at driftwood floating down the river. We took this picture around 10 pm, and the last one was about 11 pm. The weather was in the 70s and 80s the whole time we were in and around Fairbanks so it was a nice place to spend the Independence Day weekend (except for the lack of fireworks, which just wouldn't make a lot of sense anyway with the midnight sun).