Day-by-day look at Alaska

Now for our room at Wedgewood. This may the best "room" that we've ever stayed in. It was really a one-room apartment with full kitchen, a living room that was as big as ours at home, ditto the dining room. The walk-in closet in the bedroom was as big as the bedrooms that our kids stayed in the summer that Vic and I lived in Higganum, Conn., in a house that was built in 1690. The secret to this lovely room was that the Wedgewood rents these places out as furnished apartments in the winter, renting them by the night only in the summer. The furniture and paintings were lovely and we enjoyed our stay there very much.

Our room was only a few yards away from the Alaska Bird Observatory. The nature trails behind our building led to Creamer's Field, the premiere birding spot in Fairbanks. We saw Canada geese and sandhill cranes galore.

Vic's dormitory mate from Stanford University, Ken Whitten, lives in Fairbanks. He's a retired Alaska Fish and Game biologist. Vic and Ken actually reconnected only a few years ago after their college days. Ken was doing some Internet research on national wildlife refuges and came across one of our Independent columns on the internet. He wondered if this clean-cut environmental writer could be the same Vic Leipzig that he knew in college. Back then, Vic was a bearded, pony-tailed political science major.

When Ken was at Bolsa Chica a couple of years ago doing some birding on vacation, he ran into Vic and recognized him immediately. Vic was thrilled to reestablish contact with Ken, and we’ve planned to visit Alaska ever since. Ken has been reading our Independent columns online ever since. Don’t you just love the Internet?

When Vic saw how large our "room" was, he invited Ken and his wife Mary to have dinner with us. That posed a bit of a problem, since we had no staples and no groceries and only a rudimentary set of pans. The situation was easily resolved. We made a trip to the grocery store where we picked up a loaf of good French bread to heat in the oven, some snow crab legs to steam, butter and lemon for the crab legs and ice cream for dessert because we knew the Whittens were bringing blueberries. We also got some pickled herring in sour cream, a couple of cheeses and a couple of kinds of crackers for appetizers.