Tok to Fairbanks
Land of the midnight sun? Land of the midday cloud, more like. It was overcast again when we got up.
The guidebook promised us good roads, but winding, from Tok to Delta Junction, the end of the Alaska Highway as originally built. Fairbanks and Delta Junction are still arguing over where it ends now. What we actually got was very smooth roads that were perfectly straight most of the time. There are some views along the way, in a small kind of a way compared to Kluane.
Shortly before Delta Junction, we stopped at a business that’s been pushing advertising at us for at least 500 miles - Delta Meats and Sausage. We bought beef jerky, buffalo New York strip, buffalo mince (for burgers) and reindeer mince (also for burgers), from a woman who SAID EVERYTHING AT THE TOP OF HER VOICE, LIKE DAVID LYNCH’S CHARACTER GORDON COLE IN TWIN PEAKS.
In Delta Junction, we postponed visiting the “end of the Alaska Highway” photo-opportunities, and instead visited the Buffalo Center Diner. It has a model train that does circuits of the dining room, and it serves buffalo burgers. Debbie had one. I had one smothered in buffalo chilli. It was good and it was huge.
The diner had a little video arcade. I got excited because I thought it had an original Pac Man, but alas all its cabinets were reissues running emulators.
We doubled back to the visitor centre, for those photo-ops. I had been looking forward to buying celebratory tat, but there was really nothing suitable. The one “I survived the Alaska Highway” T-shirt was not one that I could see myself wearing very often. There were things to stand next to and photograph, though.
We pressed on, following the course of the Tanana (”the reflex!”) river, towards Fairbanks. The Tanana is enormously wide here. It must be quite a sight during the spring thaw.
We were heading for the River’s Edge RV Park, and took a wrong turn following a sign to the River View RV park. Not used to a settlement with more than one road, we took a slightly odd route but ended up in the right place. Soon we were hooked up — Debbie reversing into the space so smoothly that perfect strangers were queuing up to congratulate her.
We got the bikes out, and headed for the downtown area, equipped with an unsuitable map. We found some cycle paths which followed a four lane highway through areas of light industry, and by the time we got to where we wanted to be, we had formed a poor opinion of Fairbanks. The downtown area itself wasn’t much of an improvement. Let’s just say that beautiful architecture is not one of its strengths. We grabbed a better map from the information centre (a grass-roofed log cabin by the river), and found something to while away some time: the Ice Sculpture Museum.
The Ice Sculpture Museum is housed in an old cinema - it reminded me of my days at the Electric Cinema in Birmingham. The show a short film, then refrigerated glass rooms around the edge light up, revealing actual ice sculptures - none of which are quite as spectacular as the ones in the film, but which I imagine are less fragile. We were allowed into the refrigerated rooms, held at something like -12˚C, which is the temperature in Fairbanks in March, we were told.
After this, a Chinese ice sculptor turned a block of ice into a delicate sculpture of a bird on a twig, using a chainsaw, an electric grinding tool and a heat gun. It was very impressive indeed. There were photos of his prize winning “proper” work around, it’s pretty amazing, generally themed on Chinese legends.
We ambled around looking for dinner. Yes, there’s buffalo steak in the RV, but our site doesn’t have a fire pit. Supposedly, we did this with open minds, but the guide book said that Fairbanks was full of Thai restaurants, so our minds were made up really.
Bahn Thai Restaurant provided us with good Thai dins.
We collected our bikes from where we’d chained them, near the info centre. While we were there, we checked whether they had maps of cycle routes. They did. Our route home followed the river’s south bank, taking in some parks, which greatly improved our opinion of Fairbanks. We popped into Safeway near the RV park, and bought some sourdough English muffins for the next few breakfasts, along with a six pack of Alaskan Brewing Company pale ale, and an interesting concoction called “Arctic Rhino coffee porter”.