A Day in Nome, AK
 

I'm going to spending some time in Nome (about 8 hours, but could change it to 12 hours) this month. Is there anything I really should do? I'm trying not to spend any money, but will if it's worth it.

So far my plan is:
Walk to the visitor center.
Walk around the beach.
Walk around town.
Walk to a gold mine?

Is there a place I could rent a bike?

I know of a couple of tours, would any of them be recommended? I'll probably be by myself. Thanks!

Hi there...
I was in Nome one year ago today, and we had 2.4 inches of snow! It was not the nicest weather for walking around :cool:

There's really not a whole lot to walk around and see. I did spend about an hour at the McLain museum, which was rather interesting. The National Park Service has a small visitor center (on Front Street) for the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. There are a couple decent gift shops. As for gold mines, there will likely be some folks on the beach using some heavy duty equipment to look for gold, but I don't recall any mines open to the public (but that may just be my memory).

I tend to be somebody who likes to drive to the end of the road, so that was more my goal last year.

You could check with the visitor center to see if they know of any place that rents bikes or maybe even an ATV. See http://www.nomealaska.org/vc/ There are only two places that rent vehicles, and IIRC,those are about $110 per day, as of last year.

riftime

Well, if no one answers you, and you get out to Nome and figure out what to do, be sure to post back what you did. I'm curious myself!

One of my teachers in high school lived in Nome several years ago and really enjoyed it, so there has to be some redeeming qualities out there... ;)

(Edit: I've had this thread open on my screen for more than 24 hours...sorry I didn't seee riftime's post until just now after I posted!)

As a follow up, did not get too Nome. Had to go to Fairbanks instead.

Looked neat though, didn't realize the animal life out there. Including Muxoxen which I didn't knew existed in Alaska. There is one viewable in the Anchorage airport (it's dead) on the way down to the car rental or parking garage. Also missed out on their Summer Solstice festive. I do want to get out there though, and will probably have another opportunity next month and I'll report back if I do go. Thanks for the help though!

I think with NW miles you can spend 35K and cobble together both Nome and ANC on AS, or just try to get Nome by itself on 25K. Would think renting a car for a day and seeing the "last train to Nowhere" might be neat. You could cover the whole road system, even.

Or just drink copious amounts of booze, said to be a local pastime.

Can't say I'm motivated to do a trip just to Nome, but with ANC or somewhere else as stopover it might be worth the 10K extra miles.

If you transfer the NW miles to DL, then you can combine both ANC and Nome for 25K miles since DL allows a free stopover on their award tickets. I have done it with ANC and AKN.

Now that my original plans were canceled, since I live in Alaska, I was going to use 15k inter-state award on AS. It's a great value for what the ticket normally costs.

I would highly recommend anyone going to Alaska and using miles to tack on an Alaska Airlines segment to somewhere, if they can. Even if it is only a day trip to Nome :p

IIRC the inter-state still allows a stopover... so add 2 cities for the price of one :p

They do! You have to call to book them though, most of the time. But, I believe you can't connect through the same place twice, you would need to do something like ANC-CDV (stopover) CDV-JNU (stopover) -ANC You couldn't do ANC-OME-ADK(via ANC)- ANC

Interstate or intrastate?

Both allow it :p