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Published: June 23rd 2015
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We started our day Sunday washing the pickup & 5th wheel by hand at the RV Park before driving north to Fairbanks. We had the black pickup shining & it stayed clean for 12 minutes; grrrr!! We drove through a couple little rain showers, just enough to make a mess of the pickup! The air is filled with smoke thoughout the entire state of Alaska from 186 wild fires burning, 47 new ones this morning from lightning strikes overnight. The beautiful mountains we have heard so much about are, unfortunately, obscured by smoke as you can see in the picture. At this writing, the smoke coming in the camper windows is smelling very strong! Mike just read that the National Weather Service in Fairbanks has issued a dense smoke advisory for the Fairbanks area…..in effect until noon tomorrow. Visibility is reduced to 1/2 mile. At this point, we are not changing any of our plans & hoping for the best. The reason we have the windows open is shortly after arriving yesterday, our AC quit working & it is in the 80s here. We had to “tear down camp” this morning to take the RV in to a repair shop, &
the guy there determined the transformer is the culprit. There were none to be had in Fairbanks, so it is being shipped overnight, & the guy from the AC shop is coming here to install it tomorrow afternoon. We had planned to stay here in Fairbanks for three nights anyway. I tell Mike worse things could happen! He suspects low voltage in the campground could have caused our problem as this is a very large campground full of RVs & everyone had their AC going. Anyway, back to the fun stuff. We stopped in Delta Junction to take a picture of the end of the Alaska Highway, which is 1422 miles from where we started the highway in Dawson Creek, BC. Quite an adventure! After getting set up here & having a late lunch we enjoyed very good wifi & got caught up on the world again😊 We went for a lovely walk through a wild bird sanctuary before heading to downtown Fairbanks for the Midnight Sun Festival celebrating summer solstice. These Fairbanks people love to eat as there were an unbelievable amount of food stands! We ate way too much junk food, but it sure tasted good! We hung
out downtown until nearly midnight & came home in the bright sunshine to have a cocktail before going to bed. There were a large number of people doing all kinds of activities at that hour; crazy! Golfing, plalying baseball, walking their dogs, & just out driving around. We went to bed at 1 o’clock this morning & the sun was just setting! It does not get very far below the horizon before coming back up again, so it does not get completely dark here! This morning after bringing the RV back to get set up (again), we ventured to Fairbanks for lunch at Big Daddy’s BBQ, which was featured on The Food Network’s, Diners, Drive Ins & Dives with Guy Fieri. We enjoyed Alaskan beer & smoked beef brisket, which is what Guy ordered when he was there; fun place! We then went to a viewing area to see the Alaska Pipeline, which is 800 miles in length, running from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. It is 4’ feet in diameter. We learned a lot & it was interesting. Mike was then drug to the Georgeson Botanical Gardens, which I do think he didn’t mind so terribly much, but it was
84 degrees & quite warm to be walking around the gardens. Another two weeks & the place will be gorgeous, but there were still plenty of flowers in bloom. We did a little shopping & had leftover chili for supper on this hot day!
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