Today has gone really quickly and has been lots of fun, even though we didn't do a great deal.

We went for breakfast/lunch at a place that Billie said was the "best cafe in all of Fairbanks". We both had a cooked breakfast which included reindeer sausages. Although we really enjoyed the food, we couldn't finish it because of the huge American portions.

From there we went on a long walk to the supermarket since buses don't run on Sundays. Yesterday we had wondered where all the shops were when we were in the town centre. Today we realised that instead of lot of shops, they just had one big shop that had everything. It was HMV, Tesco, Wilkos, Homebase, Debenhams and Ikea all under one roof. Suffice to say it took a few hours to navigate all the aisles and find some fresh food that we could cook for dinner. We enjoyed seeing the International food aisle that had an English section with things like Hob Nobs, Heinz baked beans amd tins of mushy peas :-)

When we got back we got straight to sleep so that we could get up around midnight and hopefully see the Northern Lights. As I said before, the websites say you have an 80% chance of seeing them if you stay for 3 nights. Since we didn't want to stay outside all night at -22 C, we took turns checking outside every 15 minutes. I had done that the previous evening and seen nothing. Luckily at 2am I saw a faint green band in the distance. I quickly got Shil and we ran down the road to a good vantage point where there were no street lights or buildings. It was so much brighter there. We stood in the field for half an hour watching the strange Nothern lights flowing round the sky. At times it got faint and then came back even brighter. It was amazing to see. I tried to take some photos, but it didn't work out too well and besides taking photos meant taking gloves off. Brrrrrr. I'm so pleased we actually saw the Northern Lights. I was worried that we'd come all this way and miss them. Hopefully we'll see them again before we leave.

D