After biking approximately 300 miles from Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska, or, as they say up here, Alaska’s biggest village, me Rob and Dave arrived to Fairbanks. Fairbanks is the second biggest town and is home for about 35000 residents. It was a funny feeling knowing that except from Juneau in the south there’s pretty much only tiny villages in the state, a lot of them, only access by flight. We decided to check in on Go north hostel in town were we slept in a tepee. After a shower and a cup of coffee we cruised down to town for a visit at the library and the visitor centre. Apparently, Fairbanks have the biggest extremes in the weather up here with warm, well, fairly warm summers and I guess, shitcould winters. Later on me and Dave decided to take a bike ride to Fred Mayers to get some dinner for the night and with no idea about it, Fairbanks was going to be the place for our firsta Alaskan BBQ. Dave was finished whit his shopping and waited outside while I was lost in the endless floors of fred Mayers looking for powder milk. When I finally made my way out swearing over big supermarkets and fat ladies with coupons he had hooked us up for BBQ for the night after a chat with Sarah that lives in town. Dave went in for a bear and meat mission while I recovered outside. Later on we took of to Sarah’s place and had a great time with her and her buddies.
On the following day we decided to start our journey down south and did so around lunchtime. Dave’s plan is to bike down to Haines and catch the ferry there to Bellingham or Vancouver while mine is, as always not in concrete, to follow the alcan down to Dawson Creek and later on Jasper and Banff NP where I’m going to visit Rob and Zoe that I met in NZ last year. After that some road will take me to Bellingham on the American west coast.
When we left Fairbanks rain was in the air and we hit a slightly bit of drizzle heading out of town. We have been kinda lucky with the roads and winds so far up here and covered a lot of distance in a short period of time without to much effort put into it. The first stop on the way south was North Pole and Santa’s house which is a shopping center with x-mas all year around. Dave sended some postcards before we continued on the fairly heavy trafficked road. We passed an American airforce base and I took some photos. 2 minutes later a police pulled up behind us and a deep voice said
“Sir, you can not take pictures here”
- Sorry dude, didn’t know about that
“Can you please come over here and delete theme for me”
- for sure
That was good, I was just going to send them to Usama Bin Ladens brother . We looked at the map and decided Richardson will be our next stop . The miles went by and when we finally run out of both water and energy we were very surprised we hadn’t reached Richardsson yet and start to expect it didn’t exist. A pick up pull up on the truckstop and we asked the guy if he saw the town when he came from the other direction. It was confirmed. There aint no Richardsson. The lady in the passanger seat asked me after my first sentence.
“you are Swedeish aren’t you?”
It showed up she was from Halmstad but moved to Las Vegas 15 years ago. I guess she guessed my Heritage based on the accent and maybe a little bit by the blond hair . We continued down the road for a wee bit and put up our tent by the river and fell asleep to the sound of 2 beavers fooling around in the water.
In the morning we continued and in Big Delta we got our first glimpse of the trans Alaskan pipeline that takes the oil from Prudhoe Bay in the far north to Valdez in the south. We arrived to Delta Junction and the start of the famous Al can HW which is and 1422 mile long stretch down to Dawson Creek in BC. It was constructed 1942 with the purpose to connect Alaska with the lower 48. 12000 men were working from both ends of the road for 6 months and it served first fro military viechles but opened up for crazy bicyclist in 1948.
We stopped in Delta Junction for a visit at the library and later on a beautiful lunch. I introduced Dave for Baked Bean chippie sandwich or as they also called, Swedish hamburgers. The meal was developed in the vast land of Riwaka Valley, NZ and is perfect for hardworking activities were you don’s want to spend more than 3 minutes on cooking . Our first stretch on the alcan was excellent with good weather and sight of moose’s along the road.
The Destination the day after became Tok. I remember talking about Tok with Paul up in Anchorage the day before I set of. He explained that the people in Tok may be alittle bit “funny”. I explained that Tok in Swedish is the same name for maniac. He laughed and said: Well, how appropriate . To Tok we had 70 sonme miles to go with Dot Lake as only spot on the map in between.
Sorry, thats part one, didnt got more internet time
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