Our first day in Fairbanks

Spoiler alert - our first day in Fairbanks was pretty much spent researching for places to live. Luckily check out at our motel wasn't until noon, so we had hours of wifi to research in the morning. Laura probably made around 10 calls and sent out a few emails. Most of our favorite places didn't work for some reason or other - the most common problem being that Laura and Diana will have a cat up here in the winter.

After we checked out of our hotel, we weren't quite sure where to go. We tried to go to a few parks in town and do some more research and relax, however the first few parks we tried to go to didn't really have good places for us to sit.

We decided to head up to campus. Parking is free on weekends (or we misread the signs and were lucky not to get a ticket) so we parked our car and took our laptops to a grassy field in the middle of campus. There was free wifi there, so we continued to research places to live and make calls. However we eventually reached a point where there was just no one new to contact. We were waiting to hear back from a handful of people, but we had reached a stopping point. By then we were starting to get hungry so we headed off to Taco Bell to get good healthy nourishment (right?) and kill some time.

After lunch we decided to go back up to campus just to relax this time. We sat in the car in the shade and read about the town of Fairbanks. We were both pretty sleepy so we just sort of lazed. We had been in contact with Laura's new adviser - and he offered us a place to stay. We decided to take him up on this offer because we figured it would be good to have a home base that we could do our research from. He also said that there was a neighborhood block party at 6, and that we were invited to come along. There were even other students and professors there that we could network with.

So at 4:30 we headed over to his house. This was the first time that Laura had met him, so we were both a bit nervous however he is very friendly so it went well. The party was also fun, it seems like a nice neighborhood and now we want to live there. Mere minutes from town, you feel like you're in the middle of the wilderness. The neighbors mentioned cabins being open in the area, so we even got come phone numbers and our information was passed to a local landlord. Laura met a fellow grad student in her program and another professor that will be next door to her.

We definitely felt much better that evening than we had the night before. We were networking and hearing of new possible places to stay, we were meeting locals and feeling like we were part of the community instead of wandering around it aimlessly.

We got a good nights sleep in a cozy house. Even though sunset is at 10pm, it stays light long after. So we haven't really seen darkness in awhile. They say if you wake up in the middle of the night you can see the Aurora though, because it is getting dark enough now. We will have to do that soon!

We woke up nice and early and went to a local coffee shop.  Laura went to a weekly Monday morning meeting, signed papers and got a tour. I hunkered down in the library with my laptop to write these posts and research places to live. That brings us to now... which I suppose is past 'our first day in Fairbanks'.

Laura is back now so we are going to call a few more places. Wish us luck! We have one really good place, but it isn't available September 1st so we would have to figure out where we would stay until then. There are a couple of other places that we need to call as well. There was one cabin - our favorite location, month to month, cheap, etc - and it was booked before we could even call them. Mere hours after the ad was posted. Very unfortunate. Anyway, I shall go now so I can get back to researching. Bye bye!