Day 7: Beaver Creek YT - Fairbanks AK

OK, this is totes bizarre.  Can't upload any photos from the laptop, but download them to the iPad first and then fire them up to Flickr and they upload just like that.  Albeit that the iPad downsizes them somewhat first.  Still, there are now pictures from a grey day on the roads of north-western Leftpondia.

No issues crossing the border except that I had to park up and go into the office for the formalities, and thus got wet.  Because it rained with differing degrees of enthusiasm all day.  There is, unsurprisingly, little difference between the Yukon side of the frontier and the Alaskan one, except that the road on latter is in worse shape.  Lots of lakes:

and the odd river

and many many trees all the way through Tok and on to Delta Junction.  Here the Alaska Highway meets the Richardson Highway, which is the road from the port of Valdez up to Fairbanks, and thus stops.

The Alaskan didn't bother to renumber the mileposts after the Canadians trimmed chunks off the original route but whichever way you slice it, it's been 3400 km from Calgary and all the Alaska Highway except a 62 km stretch between Jake's Corner and the junction with YT-2, which will be done on the way back.  Delta Junction has all sort of gubbins on show, including a pig.

No, really.  It's a pig as used for cleaning the insides of pipelines, and the reason they have one lying around is this:

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline which carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean down to Valdez, where drunken tanker captains can pour it into the sea.  Or something.

More rain and rivers until you approach the North Pole.  Well, a North Pole.

This one's a fake, though, as any fule kno the real one, where Santa really lives, is near Rovaniemi in Finland.  Money back, please.

Finally I reached Fairbanks.  Feels strange - dual carriageways, traffic lights and people everywhere.  Tomorrow I have the day off, unless I choose to go somewhere, such as not the Yukon River bridge or the Arctic Circle as they both lie up the Dalton Highway and you're not supposed to take your hire car up there, on account of how they haven't surfaced it (and probably never will).  And if you leave a comment to the effect that I should go anyway, I probably won't notice it, because Blogspot has decided not to bother e-mailing me notifications of comments awaiting approval, or else Yahoo is eating them before they even reach my spam folder.