More Robert Service?

Did someone ask for more Robert Service?

There's a race of men that don't fit in,

A race that can't stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,

And they climb the mountain's crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,

And they don't know how to rest.

- Robert Service, The Men That Don’t Fit In


It's fine to have a blow-out in a fancy restaurant,

With terrapin and canvas-back and all the wine you want;

To enjoy the flowers and music, watch the pretty women pass,

Smoke a choice cigar, and sip the wealthy water in your glass.

It's bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill,

But it's quite another matter when you

Pay the bill.

- Robert Service, The Reckoning

5766

5766

That’s how many miles I put on the Explorer in the last three weeks.

How far is that?

According to Mapquest, if, when I picked up the car in Seattle, I had driven home to Charlotte and back to Seattle, I would have driven 5678 miles.

Now there’s an idea for the next vacation.

Vancouver to Seattle

Seattle is a short drive from Vancouver (relative to the distances I’m used to), and I got in to the Seattle area early this afternoon. Instead of going to the hotel, I went down to Pike Place Market to walk around. I got to see the guys toss the fish being bought back to the guys wrapping it. They’re pretty good. The specialty today was Copper River Salmon, from the Copper River in Alaska. I crossed the Copper River on the way to the Denali Highway a week ago. I’ll bet the fish got here a lot faster than I did.

Got back to the Hampton Inn in Lynnwood to watch the NBA playoffs. And then I realized that the Mariners were in town and I could have gone to see them. Terrible mistake. Way to go, Boston, but you sure took away any tension.

At least the PGA gave us some excitement this week.

This thing is coming to a close. Guess I’d better think about what it all means.

Vancouver

Pretty day all day in Vancouver today. But if you looked outside, it would be hard to say what the temperature is. I noticed it all day long. Some people on the streets are wearing hooded sweatshirts and flannels. Some are wearing t-shirts and shorts. The clothes I brought for Alaska are long on long sleeves, but I dragged out a short sleeve shirt.

Went for a long walk this morning, then came back and watched the end of the US Open. That was some exciting golf.

Then I took one of those hop-on hop-off bus tours that take you all over the city. It was a good way to get an overview.

The bus drivers on these tours give you the highlights of the city. They also point out their favorite restaurants and shops. These line up pretty much with the restaurants and shops that advertise on the map of the tour that you get.

There are a lot of high rise condos going up in Vancouver, ala Charlotte. One driver pointed out a building going up called the Shangri-La. At 63 stories it will be the tallest in the city. The penthouse has been sold to Jean Claude Van Damme fot $15M. Maybe I should have learned karate.

One of the drivers pointed out that Vancouver is very diverse ethnically, and around 1/3 of the population is Oriental. This same guy pointed out a little later that, even though Vancouver is consistently ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world, there is a bit of a dark side. He said that Vancouver has less crime than “most of the major port cities in the world.” I’m thinking claiming that your city has less crime than Marseilles is damning with faint praise.

The driver went on to say that one of the most notorious crimes in recent years was a hijacking of a tour bus full of Japanese tourists a couple of years ago. The robbers took all their money and jewelry and fled, but the Vancouver police caught the criminals within a few hours. The driver paused, then added that the police had some significant help. They had several hundred pictures of the criminals to work with.

About 1/3 of the passengers on the bus groaned. Another 1/3 didn’t get it at all. The other 1/3 sat there with their cameras, being inscrutable.

Duncan to Vancouver

Left Duncan this morning and drove up the coast for a ways. Then headed for Victoria. I’ve been in Victoria before, briefly, a long time ago. Didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Victoria, instead headed for the ferry over to Vancouver.

On the way to the ferry I stopped at Butchart Gardens. I’d also been there along time ago. Butchart Gardens. A little over a hundred years ago the area where Butchart Gardens is was a played out limestone quarry. The owners decided to reclaim it, brought in hundreds of tons of top soil, and now the gardens cover 55 acres.

The gardens are something to see, but I kept thinking I should have been here about three weeks ago. From a bloom perspective, this is kind of the shoulder season. All the rhododendron and azaleas (and there are acres of them) are just over, and most of the summer blooming plants are just starting.

From Butchart, I went up and caught the ferry for another hour and a half cruise to just south of Vancouver. The BC ferry system is really well run. As I said, these are big ships, and they really move the vehicles on and off in a hurry. Both boats I was on had two restaurants (well, cafeterias), gift shop/newsstand, a travel agent kind of place, and several lounges. You can tell who’s from the local area. They’re the ones who take naps on the trip.

Added some more wildlife to the list on the ferry trip. We passed a family of sea lions (or is it a pack, a pod, or a pride of sea lions?). I guess sometimes they see whales on this trip. Not this time.

I’m at the Hampton Inn in Vancouver. Great location, on the east end of the downtown area, right next to the hockey arena and the football stadium. Both of these are going to be renovated for the Olympics.

Went down the street to Dix Barbecue for dinner and watched the NBA playoff game. Dix claims “Authentic Southern Barbecue.” Actually, they don’t do a bad job. But no hush puppies, and no Brunswick stew.

I’m looking forward to spending the day in Vancouver tomorrow. Seems like a great town.

Funny how the pictures I’m posting are changing. Not a whole lot of dramatic scenery any more.

Whistler to Duncan, BC

The entire road from Whistler to Horseshoe Bay, where I caught the ferry, was under construction. I gather it’s under construction all the way into Vancouver. They’re trying to turn what had been a two lane road into a four lane road before the Olympics.

Took the BC ferry over to Vancouver Island at Nanaimo. The ferry ride was about an hour and a half, and pretty neat. The BC ferry’s are big ships. Four levels of cars and two levels for passengers during the ride. The east side of Vancouver Island south of Nanaimo is a lot of little villages. I worked my way down to Duncan, where I’d found another deal on a Best Western room.

Bagged some new wildlife today: Bald Eagle, Red Tailed Hawk, Great Horned Owl, Saker Falcon, and a Turkey Vulture (Sandy, are you paying attention?)

It turns out the Northwest Raptor Center is on the way to Duncan, and I got there just before their flying demonstration. The flying demonstration was awesome, particularly the falcon. The falcon is the fastest moving creature on earth. Trust me – these suckers can fly. It was all really cool.

It’s a lot warmer here in the south (Southern British Columbia). Mid 70’s and sunny today. The outdoor pool at the hotel is open, and there are some folks in it. Canadians undoubtedly.

Duncan is the home of the world's largest hockey stick. It's on the side of the hockey arena. That seems to be the thing for small towns in BC - a lot of them have the world's largest of some article. One town I went past through was home to the world's largest gold mining pan. There have been several others.

Maybe some of the local chambers of commerce in our area ought to do something like that. Maybe some of Charlotte's neighborhoods could even get into the act:

- Concord - Home of the world's largest NASCAR fan. (just picture this sculpture)

- Gastonia - Home of the world's largest PBR can.

- Waxhaw - Home of the world's largest community entrance gate

- South Charlotte - Home of the world's largest SUV

- Myers Park - Just a sign that says "We could be the home of the world's largest something, but it's unseemly. We choose not to particpate."

- Plaza Midwood - Home of the world's largest rainbow bumper sticker. Not that it matters.

I'm sure you can think of others. Like "Charlotte: Home of....."

Prince George to Whistler

After thinking about the alternatives my plan is to do Whistler and Vancouver Island over the next couple of days.

I can’t find the map right now that I marked the route on. I’ll add the image later if I find it.

I left Prince George and drove south on BC97. This was a stretch of road that I drove on the way north. A lot of farmland and ranches. It was country that I thought was pretty wild a couple of weeks ago, but now it seems like coming back into civilization.

I haven't mentioned yet the number of RV's I've seen on this trip, particularly on the Alaska Highway. A lot of the smaller motor homes are rentals. A lot of the big motor homes are towing a vehcile of some sort. I saw one motor home the size of a bus towing a Hummer. I figure it was costing him a dollar a mile in fuel to haul all that iron up the highway. I don't know if the RV traffic is down because of the price of fuel or not. I do know that every time I filled up, people were talking about it.

As I get further away from the Alaska Highway, the RV of choice seems to be a large pickup with a pickup camper. I'm guessing these are the locals. I've always thought this was a good, practical configuration, but you don't see it much on the East Coast.

Around lunchtime I got to Williams Lake, a town I stayed in going north. So I stopped at the Laughing Loon, where I had that great dinner. Ta da… They still had the wasabi encrusted prawns.

To get to Whistler I turned on to BC 99 when I got to Cache Creek. BC 99 is called the Sea to Sky Highway. The stretch to Whistler follows the Fraser River for a while, then cuts into the mountains. From there, it’s 100 miles of narrow, winding, mountain road that crosses countless mountain streams on one lane wooden bridges, and has waterfalls coming down right next to the road. Just what I was looking for. This might be the most scenic stretch of road I’ve been on. British Columbia would be a great place to come back to.

The road starts to come out of the wilderness at Pemberton. Pemberton and Whistler are both big centers of outdoor activities. (If you’re not aware, Whistler is one of the primo skiing locations in North America). Even in the summer, they’re busy.

I hadn’t realized (or I’d forgotten) that Vancouver is the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics, and Whistler is going to be the home of the skiing events. There’s lots of building going on and you can already by 2010 Olympics gear.

Whistler is like a big village centered around the major ski lifts. Most everything was open and it’s pretty busy. Seems like a lot of foreign accents around. I’m at a Best Western right off from the village “green”. Got a great rate yesterday from the whistler.com site.

Tomorrow I’ll head towards Vancouver, but before I get there I’ll take the ferry over to Vancouver Island for a day.

Prince George to ???

I've had some connectivity problems the last couple of days, but now the posts are all caught up to current time. Watched the Celtic's comeback this evening (early evening here). Kobe, Phil, and the Lakers are toast.

I’m ahead of my itinerary again. I’ve got reservations in Vancouver Sunday night and Monday night, so I’m open until then. There are a lot of options between now and then.
Here are some….

Jasper NP
Banff NP / Lake Louise
Doing the Cassiar Highway again
Vancouver Island
Whistler
Stay here and catch up on sleep
North Cascades National Park, Washington
Mt. Rainier (one of my favorite places, but a long ways)
Seattle
Cancel the Vancouver reservations and do something completely different

I’ll let you know what I figure out. Sunday night.

Don'cha just love a blog with some mystery?

Fort Nelson to Prince George

You know how you can tell when you’ve left the far North? I looked out my window at 10:30 tonight in Prince George, and it was dark outside. I haven’t seen dark in a long time, and it’s a little strange.

Pretty good log of wildlife today. Moose, deer, and a bear. Also watched a huge hawk dive behind some bushes into a creek bank and come up with something in its talons. Big guy. He looked like a small plane going in.

Much of today was driving through the Peace River area. And, I left the Alaska Highway today, and headed south.

Whitehorse to Fort Nelson

(I’m sure the Nelson family has noted this, but – yes, Fort Nelson is a major point on the Alaska Highway. Have you also noticed that the next major place down the highway from Fort Nelson is Fort St. John? )

Today it really seems like I’m putting Alaska in the rearview mirror.

Put in a lot of miles today – 590. The first section of the drive today, between Whitehorse and Watson Lake, was highway that I went over on the way up.

The stretch of Alaska Highway between Watson Lake and Fort Nelson is narrow and winding, but it might be the most scenic stretch of highway I’ve been on since I started.

This stretch of highway goes over a couple of different mountain ranges, including some of the Canadian Rockies, and follows a couple of different rivers. On the way, I passed through Muncho Lake. The rivers and Muncho lake were all a turquoise color, from water fed by glaciers on the surrounding mountains. The turquoise, and the different greens from the surrounding firs and birches, created a beautiful landscape to follow all day long. I hope a couple of these pictures capture the greens and turquoise.

This was also a day where I bagged some new wildlife – pictorially. I saw another moose. But, I also saw a caribou, Dall Sheep,and a bison, along the side of the rode. Yes, they were all wild.

I ended the day at Fort Nelson, population 5,000. I’m staying at the Wooodlands Inn, a nice small hotel. Ate dinner at Dan’s Neighbourhood Pub. Dan's specialty is spaghetti and local beer.

Fort Nelson is a relatively large town for this part of British Columbia. It was an early Hudson’s Bay trading post. The reason this town and others around here were named “Forts” is that they really were fortified – not so much against Indians, but against rival trading companies who were after the furs stored here.

Fort Nelson used to be home to the Canadian Chopstick Manufacturing Company, the largest manufacturer of chopsticks in the world. (Owned by - guess who - Mitsubishi). Making disposable chopsticks for China and Japan. What a business model!! They were putting out 7.5 million pairs a day - 2 billion a year. They supplied most of the Orient for most of a decade until they’d run through the local aspen forests and shut down the plant for good in 1997. Turns out a good disposable chopstick requires old growth wood. Anyone think there's an ecological issue here?

Today, there’s a lot of energy mining (gas) around Fort Nelson, and it looks like it’s thriving.

Tomorrow, I'm going to see if I can get to Prince George. From there I'll have to figure out where to go next. I'm ahead of where I planned to be in the itinerary.

Dawson to Whitehorse

A little more about Whitehorse. One of my guidebooks said it has “an end of the world vibe.” That’s a pretty good description. It feels like from here you’re stepping off into the wilderness. Also, Whitehorse has Diamond Tooth Gertie’s. Gertie’s is the northernmost casino in the world. (But don’t confuse it with Vegas casino’s. It’s much smaller and simpler). It doesn’t open until 7:00 pm, and from then on it’s probably the busiest place in town. It’s got a great bar with a view of the casino floor and the thrice-nightly can-can show. And there’s no guilt – the profits from the casino go to charity.

Left Whitehorse this morning in a drizzle that lasted most of the day. There’s a local radio station in Dawson (actually, NPR), and they said it was snowing in Whitehorse.

The road from Dawson to Whitehorse is the Klondike Highway. As you can guess, it started as an Indian trail, then became a major road during the gold rush.

When I left this morning, I thought about taking the Campbell Highway out of Carmacks and going all the way to Watson Lake. But that would have meant a day of about 700 miles, and when I got to the Campbell and it was still raining, I decided to head on to Whitehorse. I’ll try to put in a long day tomorrow and get past Watson Lake. Either way, that will put me ahead of my original itinerary again.

Yesterday and today, the road would occasionally go through areas where there had been major fires. That apparently happens routinely here, and for the most part they let them burn. There are occasional signs that tell the year of the burn you’re seeing. One burn was from the 1950’s, and that forest was far from restored. An interpretive area for the 2005 Fox Lake fire said it burned through the summer, smoldered all winter, and was out by the following spring.

I stopped for gas in Carmacks, at 45 degrees, and a steady rain. I talked to a couple of guys on motorcycles who had left Whitehorse, heading for Dawson. They did not look like they were having fun. But they did fill up for cheaper than I did.

Fairbanks to Dawson City

Drove 420 miles today, and got in to Dawson City around 5:00. Before leaving Fairbanks I called the Aurora Inn in Dawson to make sure I had a room.

To get to Dawson I went down a stretch of the Alaska Highway I hadn’t been on. Then up the Taylor Highway and Top of the World Highway. The Taylor and Top of the World Highways are mostly unpaved, and are pretty curvy and high up for most of their routes. Another beautiful drive.

On the way up the Taylor, you pass through Chicken, Alaska. There’s probably 25 people who live full time in Chicken. I’m sure they all work in the Chicken Mercantile, Chicken Grill, the Chicken Museum, or at the Chicken Post Office. You can buy a lot of different Chicken merchandise. Chicken began life as a little gold mining village. There’s still an old gold dredge there. There’s a lot of wildlife around Chicken, including many ptarmigan. When the gold miners went to name their new village, they found that no one could spell “ptarmigan”. So…

Coming down out of the mountains into Dawson City, you have to take a ferry across the Yukon River. When I got to the river, my GPS device said “You must take the ferry now.” I was amazed at the vocabulary. I’ll write more later about the use of the GPS in the north.

The location of Dawson was an Indian camp with a few miners, until 1896 when Skookum Jim Mason found the big one. By 1898, the population was 40,000, and by 1899 when the rush was over, it was back to 8,000.

The route to the gold fields started at Skagway, where the hopeful had to carry a years’ provisions over the Chilkoot Pass, build a boat or a raft, and follow the Yukon River 500 miles to Dawson. Once there, most of them found that the richest claims had been made by miners already in the area when Skookum Jim hit it.

For visitors, I think Dawson is the antithesis of Skagway. There is a lot of tourism – four of five tour buses were in town, having traveled several hundred miles from Whitehorse. But the town feels like a community, and you can still see and feel what the old Dawson is like. It would be easy to spend another day or so in Dawson.

Both Robert Service and Jack London spent time in Dawson. Both of their cabins are in town. I’ve got a book of Robert Service poetry with me, but I’m not going to post any here. Yet.

And for you hockey fans, here’s even more info about Dawson – there used to be a professional hockey team in Dawson – the Dawson City Nuggets. In 1905, the Nuggets played the Ottawa Silver Seven for the Stanley Cup. The team took a month to travel to Ottawa by dog sled, bicycle, foot, ship and train. They had to deal with seasickness, ports iced in, and ships delayed by fog. They got to Ottawa two days before the game. Their best player was delayed in Dawson and didn’t get to Ottawa until the series was over.


So do you think this ended like Hoosiers? Nope. In two games, they got outscored by 32 to 4, the most lopsided loss in Stanley Cup history.

This is the kind of information you run into in Canada.

Fairbanks

Spent today off the road in Fairbanks. It feels kind of good to be off the road.

High today in the mid-60’s, scatter clouds, and no humidity. Nice.

Fairbanks is a nice small town. Like a lot of small towns, it seems really livable. It’s large enough to have most of the retail stores we recognize. (However, the closest Costco is in Anchorage. But there is a BJ’s).

I’ve been listening to books on CD while I’m on the road. I brought four with me from Charlotte, and I’m almost done with those. I went to a Barnes and Noble here in Fairbanks looking to see what their selection was like. They had the best selection of books on tape I’ve seen anywhere. I bought three more. I guess I’m not the first person to think of audio books as a way to pass the time on Alaska roads.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks is on the edge of town, up an a ridge from which you can see Mt. McKinley (on some days). It’s a nice looking campus. The Universitiy of Alaska Museum of the North is on the campus. It’s a great museum. I spent about four hours there.

From there I went to the U of A Large Animal Research Station, a few miles off campus. At LARS, they are studying musk ox and caribou. Here are some factoids about each:

Musk ox have been around since before the Mastodon – and they look like something from the ice age.

Musk ox are native to arctic Alaska, but were wiped out by hunting in the late nineteenth century. They were re introduced with Musk ox from Greenland in the 1930’s. The re introduction has been successful.

As a defensive mechanism, the adults in a musk ox herd will form a circle around their calves. Both male and female have large horns, and facing outward, this creates a pretty effective defense against predators like bears and wolves. Against men with weapons, not so much.

Muskox wool, called qiviut, is extremely soft and a great insulator – several times warmer than other wools. (The musk ox is comfortable in the Artctic at 40 below). Qiviut yarn goes for around $80 per ounce. LARS sends the qiviut from their animals to a place in Seattle that creates the yarn. Then they send the yarn to Eskimo villages where they create items out of the yarn. A small scarf made of qiviut costs over $400. Nobody I know is getting any gifts made of qiviut.

Caribou might be the world’s best walkers. They travel in herds that might migrate several thousand miles in a year. They have long, thin legs, and hooves adapted to walking in the tundra and to digging through snow and ice to get at food.

Caribou click when they walk. There is a tendon that creates a sound with each step. One theory is that this has evolved as a form of communication among herd members in deep ice fog. Another theory is that the tendon has evolved to leverage the forward motion of the leg and make each step more efficient. Large herds of caribou can supposedly be clicking a mile away.

There will not be a test when I get back.

Tomorrow, I’m leaving Fairbanks, and heading to Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory.

Fairbanks to Fort Yukon and Return

On the way to Fairbanks I got the bug to get to the Arctic Circle. It’s “only” a couple of hundred miles north of Fairbanks. And I may never get this close to it again.

One of the ways to get to the Arctic Circle from Fairbanks is the Dalton Highway. It goes north out of Fairbanks, past the Arctic Circle and on to Prudhoe Bay, where the pipeline starts. It’s about a 200 mile drive up the Dalton Highway to the Arctic Circle.

From the travel guide information I read, it sounded like the Dalton Highway could be tough to drive. Tough, in the sense that it’s used a lot by trucks barreling to and from Prudhoe Bay. I thought I’d ask at the visitor center to see if that was really the case.

A really helpful guy at the visitor center confirmed what the books say. The road itself, although gravel, isn’t any worse than some of the other roads I’ve been on. However, with the truck traffic, it often means you come back with a cracked windshield. And frequent flat tires are reported. It’s suggested you carry two spares on the Dalton.

I know the windshield belongs to Hertz, but having a windshield repaired or replaced sounded like more hassle than I wanted to deal with. I asked the guy at the visitor center if there were alternatives. He suggested an evening flight to Fort Yukon.

Fort Yukon is a village of a little over 500 people at the confluence of the Yukon, Porcupine, and Beaver rivers. It’s north of the Arctic Circle, and accessible only by air or by occasional supply barge up the Yukon from Fairbanks.

The inhabitants of the village are almost entirely native Alaskan – the Bwich’in tribe of the Athabascan nation. Historically, the Gwich’in were nomadic hunters, who moved in family units following the game. When the first European settlers arrived in the area, around 1850, they started forming villages and added trapping to their culture. They now live in several Alaskan and Canadian villages, mostly above the Arctic Circle. They still rely on a lot of their substance skills. Trapping is still one of the major sources of income for theGiwch’in in Fort Yukon.

The air service that does the evening flights, Warbelow’s Air Services, has regularly scheduled service (daily in most cases), to 18 of these villages in interior Alaska, carrying mail, supplies, and passengers. Several years ago they reached agreement with the Fort Yukon village elders to have an evening flight in the summer to bring a small number of folks to tour their village.

The flight (in another Piper Navajo) went over the White Mountains outside of Fairbanks, then north over the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Reserve, crossed the Arctic Circle and landed at the grass landing strip at Fort Yukon.

Richard Johnson, one of the village residents, met us with an old school bus for a 45 minute tour around the village. Richard was an entertaining guy (“There are 500 residents here, and 490 of them are my cousins”), but also very straightforward about issues of his tribe. The population of the village is slowly decreasing as the young folks find ways to leave and start lives in Fairbanks or elsewhere.

The village is spread over several square miles along the Yukon River. The overall impression of the village is that it is very, very poor. Most of the buildings used as homes are small, most of them made of logs, although a few are more modern materials. Most look There is a school, and a small medical center. Both of these are relatively new and look well kept. There are many abandoned homes around. Many that appear abandoned aren’t. There are a couple of churches – one of them Southern Baptist.

There are two commercial establishments in the village. One, the Alaska Commercial company, is like a general store. Alaska Commercial has been in the village since 1869, when the US bought Alaska from Russia. The other commercial establishment is the liquor store. The liquor store doesn’t have a sign outside. Doesn’t need one.

(John – I took a lot of pictures in the village that I hope are examples of “vernacular architecture”. I’m thinking it doesn’t get any more vernacular than this.)

Our guide mentioned a couple of times that the village residents were “not far removed from the Ice Age.” That’s an interesting perspective. The village is not something I’d call nice, or tidy, or pleasant to look at. It would be easy to call it depressing. But that view is entirely from the perspective of a real outsider (me) with no business judging a different culture.

It’s not easy to figure out what to make of this. Other than, it is clearly the front line of two cultures clashing. One,a traditional culture trying to maintain its subsistence ways, relying on the natural resources of their lands, and the other, the modern, outside culture impacting it.

This clash will get more severe. Fort Yukon, and several other Gwich’in villages lie in the middle of the Fort Yukon National Wildlife Preserve. The management of the Preserve has been to support the subsistence hunting and trapping activities of the villages, but there have been conflicts. More recently, studies indicate that there are millions of barrels of oil and billions of square feet of natural gas under these villages, and under the land the villagers hunt and trap on. You can bet we’ll be hearing more about this.

The flight back got in to Fairbanks airport around 11:00 pm, still in bright daylight. I got a certificate confirming I've been above the Arctic Circle.

Denali to Fairbanks

The drive from Denali to Fairbanks is only about 150 miles, short by Alaska standards.
It’s a pretty drive, with lots of scenery, also befitting Alaska standards.

Gas is more expensive in Alaska than it is at home, but not by too much. I’ve been paying around $4.20 per gallon. It’s easy to pay more – lots more. Gas is more expensive in outlying areas, like Denali. I took the picture above at a station in Healy, the first town north of Denali. (Fortunately, I didn’t need any). There was another station in Healy, about a mile further on, that was 30 cents a gallon cheaper.

I’m in Fairbanks now, the second largest city in Alaska (next to Anchorage). To give you some perspective, the population of Fairbanks is around 80,000, making it between Asheville and Wilmington in size.

Also for perspective, the population for the entire state of Alaska is around 680,000, just a little more than the population of the City of Charlotte.

Fairbanks is as far north as I've been. It's about 150 miles below the Arctic Circle. Sunset tonight is at 12:20 am tomorrow. Sunrise is at 3:10 am. The days here are now over 21 hours long.

I’ll be in Fairbanks for two nights. It looks like it's a great place. I’m at the Marriott Springhill Suites, downtown, right across from the visitor center. When I leave here, it’ll be back down the Alaska Highway. From here, I’ll be heading back toward home.