Changes in Lattitude

"When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere." - Robert A. Heinlein

No matter how pleasant and difficulty free your trip is, somewhere along the line Murphy is going to rear his ugly head.

Back on the train.  Next stop...Fairbanks.  The northernmost destination in our travels. 

First was the (major international chain) hotel.  The first morning, my key card stopped working.  The friendly young woman at the front desk politely made me a new one and handed it to me.  No ID required.   Maybe I see things differently coming from major urban area in the lower 48.  She was genuinely confused when I expressed concern that she handed a perfect stranger a key to my room without so much as asking my name.

Next stop.  Pick up our rental car.  We had plans to drive over the Top of the World Highway into Canada, staying in Dawson City and then down to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Province.

What wasn't mentioned anywhere I saw when I made the reservation, that was emphatically pointed out by the rental clerk, is that they don't allow their cars to be taken on unpaved roadways.  Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't at least 3/4 of Alaska's road system unpaved?  To make up for it, the girl upgraded our vehicle without mentioning it to us, which caused more difficulty down the road that I'll talk about later.

As a large chunk of the Top of the World Highway is unpaved, AND, the ONLY direct way to get from Fairbanks to Dawson City, we ended up spending the entire morning of our one day in Fairbanks, scrambling to redo a large portion of our itinerary.  We had to cut Dawson City out altogether.

Even our afternoon was severly curtailed because most of the attractions outside of Fairbanks are at the ends of...unpaved highways.

So we spend the afternoon wandering around downtown Fairbanks and as the city is host to a major ice sculpting competition, we checked out the Ice Museum and saw a pretty cool ice carving demonstration.

That night we had dinner at a restaurant called "The Pump House".  I ordered...wait for it...Salmon.  Rare.  Which arrived well done.  Inedible.  I rarely send food back, but I couldn't eat this.  The waitress was blatently offended that I would dare and was barely civil to us for the rest of the meal.

Then, she brought us the check, charging us for both pieces of Salmon.  We sent that back too.

But...on the way out of the restaurant, we were treated to the first sunset of our trip.  And it was spectacular.

I love the reflection of the landscape on the side of the train

One of the few blue skies we saw.
The rain had just stopped giving us a beautiful rainbow.

Sunset outside The Pump House Restaurant.
Made up for a disappointing meal and less than stellar service.

The same sunset outside the hotel.