June 17th

THE DETAILS:

WEATHER: Woke up to cloud cover and 54 degrees. Showers began shortly after 9:00 am. But it became partly cloudy for the rest of the day around noon time. The high today was around 75.


DISTANCE: We left Delta Junction at 10:00 am. And arrived in the North Pole around 8 pm. We only drove 94 miles today.



Well, Gary was right, the campground this morning came alive at 5 am. A little early but with how bright it was outside I had a hard time getting back to sleep. What’s interesting about it being light most of the day is not that it is bright most of the time - we expected that, but when the sun is still in the sky and just as it begins to set there is a still that comes over the campgrounds. You can hear a pin drop, there is little to no traffic on the road. It’s a weird feeling to see everything shut down and look kinda’ like a ghost town when it is as bright as 7:00 pm at home.

So we got on our way further west but not far! We were in pursuit of dinner…. A fish dinner. We stopped at one state park and they were charging $20.00 for 2 hours of a boat rental on a pond plus $10.00 for every hour after that. Gary refused to pay that kind of price, so we continued on down the road. We got to another state park and there were no boat rentals at all and the pond was difficult to access. We were getting ready to pull out of the parking lot and one of the rangers asked us what part of New Hampshire we were from. He was an older guy named Paul, but as sharp and strong as a 30 year old! It turns out that he is from East Portland and has been spending his summers up here for the past 8 to 9 years running different state parks. What an interesting guy! I told him we were looking for good fishing spots along the Richardson Highway and he said, “right here is good!” We told him we didn’t have a boat and he said, “I do”. So, “only because we were from New Hampshire“, he lent us his boat and we spent 4 hours fishing on the most beautiful, peaceful pond. (Steve & Cheryl…. It looked like 3rd lake in Pittsburg). And yes, we have more than 1 fish dinner, we have 2!! Gary caught 2 and I caught 2. There were 2 at 14 inches, 1 at 13 inches and 1 at 12. Steve,Gerry & Mark; they were all rainbows. They were a lot of fun to pull in and we were even able to give Paul one for dinner! It was a good day.

We got off the pond late in the afternoon and then Gary had to put the boat away with Paul, and clean the fish and then they had to swap stories from back home. By the time we got on our way we were turned away from the first campground so went to another and here we are in the North Pole! Yes, they actually have a town called the North Pole and all the street light poles are painted like candy canes. There’s Santa’s and Christmas shops everywhere. We will try to get our Christmas ornament from here tomorrow.

The moose were on the move today. We saw 2 of them, and Northway even lost their one week old ambulance to a collision with a moose last night. All along the road here there are these beautiful purple flowers that smell like hyacinth. We found out that they are called fire weed.

PS: Dan, sorry about taking letters A thru P to get here. Maybe we should try to make our return trip in 10 stops!! Ha! The way we’re going we may go through the alphabet twice. I think it’s time to find out what google maps can do for us. To answer your question, we are probably going to move most nights because we have to break camp every morning anyway just to get around so we might as well continue to move forward rather than come back to the same camp. It will be different when we reach a place we want to spend more time and get around with the scooter or do a bus tour, like Fairbanks, Anchorage and Denali State Park. We’ll see where the road takes us!