Fairbanks Festivities

We were lucky enough to get to Fairbanks on the weekend of the Golden Days celebration. We arrived in town too late Saturday to go to the parade, but Pat invited us to see the River Parade today. This is an interesting and offbeat event involving boat floats that are clearly of amateur or homemade construction. One of the rules is that each entry must use duct tape in a visible manner in the construction of the float. It is not clear if there are other rules as it mostly seems to be a sort of partially organized chaos. Many of the boats have "gunners" who have the large soaker types of squirt guns that they use to attack other boats. These were on a few occasions directed at onlookers on shore but this was an exception and didn't work well in any case. It was perfect weather and turned out to be an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.

The boats in the parade were varied

This is one of our favorites, was made out of cardboard boxes, but stayed afloat the entire parade, of course the guy in the back was constantly bailing water out.





Even Palin showed up for a ride.



Santa showed up a bit early this year.

and of course frosty followed along with the chill baby chill.


This one needed a bit of female power.

Here comes the bar float will be followed by the band,


This is the band, they were pretty good too.


Ahhh, the water slide to cool off a bit.


On our way back we stopped for a few minutes at Pioneer Park which was very crowed. It looked like most of the Alaska State Police force must have been present. The event involved the formal resignation and formal transition of Governor Sarah Palin and her replacement by Sean Parnell. We saw this Tina Fey look alike serving hot dogs to the crowd. We thought of getting in line for a free lunch but the strain on Barb of keeping her mouth shut for this Republican party event would have been too great so we went on our way.


took this picture for Bailey.