Destination Fairbanks

When we pulled into Fairbanks we joked that if we ever left, we'd have to move to Florida or Maine. We arrived at the hospital to pick up our key for our temporary housing and the maintenance man told us he has made the drive to or from Maine 3 times now. The irony. On one trip they went through the US states and drove some 6000 miles. Regardless, our 3000 mile journey (actual miles may vary - by about 60 miles. I suppose we should have driven around Fairbanks a few times to make a nice round number out of it) from Colorado to Fairbanks was a long, long drive.

The housing is a cute 2 bedroom apartment that we'll be comfortable in until we get settled and can find permanent housing. I'll try to get some pictures from today, as well as our housing at another time. Frankly the drive has taken it out of me to go through the photos from today, but I'll try to summarize some of the drive while its fresh in my memory.

We woke early and started the drive while it was still dark out. I wasn't able to get any better picture of the mountains surrounding Haines Junction on our way out. The road was still ice packed, but it was just a bit colder this morning and the road conditions were slightly better than the night before, but still miserable. I was planning on a very long and stressful drive day, and was pleasantly surprised when less than an hour out of Haines Junction, the roads started to improve significantly as the temperatures began to fall and we continued moving north. We really started to put some miles behind us, when my joy of our good fortune came to a sudden end when we hit the first of the forewarned, from our Milepost guidebook, frost heaves.

Our Milepost guidebook has been of marginal usefulness overall, but did have enough information to be worth bringing along. Had we not had our trusty Garmin GPS along for the ride, the Milepost would have been a valuable tool. As it were, I felt the GPS was the better tool, along with the information passed word of mouth that we would certainly have gas available every 100 miles or so, and we soon came to rely on this as truth. The biggest failing of both tools is that many of the facilities along the route are seasonal, and neither the GPS nor Milepost had information about the seasonal availability.

So back to frost heaves, or as I soon came to call them, whoop-de-dos, after my experience riding the later in the desert on my motocross bike. A frost heave is exactly what it sounds like, that being a heave of the road caused by varying warm and cold temperatures, and the resulting frozen ground pushing up the road. These present themselves as dips or bumps in the road, but found that they most often line up in the road one after another forming perfect whoops-de-dos. This would be a fair inconvenience in a car by itself, but adding a trailer to the mix with an already heavy tongue weight created an articulation between truck and trailer that was a significant impediment to driving down the road, and forced slowing down beyond the poor ice conditions previously experienced. I found myself wishing for flat icy roads in favor of the frost heaves.

Despite the slowdowns, there were large sections of good road in which we were able to make good time, and we made the most of them. The border crossing was uneventful, and getting back into the US was much quicker than getting into Canada. Shortly after crossing the border into Alaska, the highway was both flat and ice free, and we made good time the rest of the route through to Delta Junction, where we stopped for food, and onward to Fairbanks.

K. Chadwick