June 17 - Tok to Fairbanks

After a night of fairly heavy rainfall, we woke up to a glorious morning. Sunshine beamed into our tent and birds were chirping like crazy. We packed up and, on the recommendation of our camping neighbour, we headed over to Fast Eddy's for breakfast. 

Almost as soon as you leave Tok, a mountain range pops up on the south side of the highway, part of the Alaska Range according to our map. The highway itself runs along the Tanana River for a lot of the trip to Fairbanks and a fellow at a gas station explained to me that it's what they call a braided river - these rivers rise up to to be enormous when there is a lot of rain or during glacier melt but then reduce down to just small creeks so they look very low and dried up a lot of the time. 

Maybe because it was the sunshine, maybe because I had a good breakfast in my belly, maybe because I had some great tunes playing on my stereo but I found this riding day just great. At Delta Junction, there is a good sized wildfire buring to the northeast, filling the sky with a vast plume of purple, red and black smoke. You can see it for miles.

About 50kms before Fairbanks is the Eielson Air Force Base and HOLY HANNAH it's huge. As you ride along side it on the highway, there are rows and rows of military jets in front of huge hangars. After that were rows and rows of military cargo planes and more huge hangars. Eielson is the seat of of the US military defense in the north and boy, are they serious about it! All along the highway, there are signs telling people not to stop and not to take photos. In the Christmas Store we were in a little later in North Pole, Alaska, I over heard a lady telling her story about when she stopped and took photos, the military police arrived, asked for her camera and deleted the photos she had of the base on there. They don't kid around about that. According to the Milepost, the base is 63,000 acres with a population of about 3000. The runway is 14,000 feet long (almost 3 miles!) just to give you an idea of the enormity of it. It's a small town in it's own right...

From here, we stopped at the North Pole. You have to, right? Yes, it's a tourist trap but it's kind of cool. There is a year round Christmas Store here but one of the neat things they do is they have a program where they will send kids letters from Santa from the post office in North Pole, Alaska. They also have a barnyard area where they house reindeer... it's complete kitsch but a little bit of kitsch never hurt anyone... ha ha ha...

We finished up the day by rolling into Fairbanks, a very pretty city that is built around a stretch of the Chena river. We snagged a camping site right on the river bank at River's Edge RV Park which we would recommend. The RV part is crammed and tight but lots of trees. The camping area is very nice, right on the river. There is also a large picnic area on a grassy part of the river bank for all to enjoy. The bonus is that the park is minutes from downtown. We walked down the river path to Chena's Alaskan Grill, a very nice restaurant with a huge deck that looks out on the river. A bit "spendy" as the Alaskans say - a groovy saying I think I might hang on to in lieu of the word "expensive" - but a nice meal with a gorgeous view...