Day 1 The adventure starts

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Distance driven: 320 miles / 515 km



Today’s trip: Fairbanks, Alaska to Beaver Creek, Yukon, Canada

Border crossings: 1

Brown bears spotted by the road: 1

Schools with Kindle e-readers visited: 1



Everything has gone really smooth, and trip is off to a great start. By the time I arrived at Fairbanks late Thursday evening and got to my hotel, the time was well past midnight. I guess that I had forgotten exactly how far north on the map Alaska and Fairbanks really are. Being this close to the Arctic Circle also means that the summer never sets; rather the sun just moves laterally along the horizon throughout all night and refuses stubbornly to ever set.

It’s been a long first day for sure. First things in the morning, I picked up the bike from the transportation company and spent over one hour uncrating it. Taking apart a professionally built wooden crate, turned out to involve a lot of hard manual work. Who knew!

Next stop was Wendy Demers, head teacher at the Chinook Montessori school in Fairbanks. We met at the school and spent three hours going through the Kindle e-readers we donated last year. Wendy showed me the custom wooden box which her husband had built to house the e-readers in the class room. She then walked me through the online device and content management tool from Amazon, called Whispercast, which she has been using to manage her e-reader in the classroom. I was more than happy to provide tech support, and help her figure out how to better utilize the student accounts for the devices for the fall semester.

All in all, it was a great visit and I left the Chinook Montessori school with a sense of gratification, after having heard Wendy describing how excited her students had been over getting to read on the e-readers.

In Wendy’s words: “The e-readers have been wonderful. The students love reading on them and they often don’t want to put them down at the end of the silent reading hour that we have every day. I only wish that we had more devices so that every student could have their own.”

On the Alaska highway, riding towards the Canadian border, I managed to shoot some really beautiful and spectacular scenery on my GoPro camera as I was driving. Anxious to edit the clips, as soon as I got to my motel room in Beaver Creek on the Canadian side of the border, I discovered that I had forgotten to put an SD card in the camera!!! On the positive side, I ca guarantee you that a similar tech snafu is not going to happen again during this trip.

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