TravellingStrom

Monday – Fairbanks, Alaska

I like days like this, very easy to write up after all the long difficult days prior to this. Because we had decided to stay for a few days, we had made use of the empty fridge in the kitchen area of our housing block and bought food, like ham, eggs, bread, snags etc so it was an easy job to make some snags and eggs, although the snags were not true snags but bratwurst type things, great eating though 🙂

OK, so I burnt the snag, isn’t that normal? Next thing on my agenda was to go buy a few things, I have no idea where Simon is, asleep most likely 🙂 So I did the rounds, bought a new battery for the Tyre watch, it is indicating low again, a new toothbrush, I was also looking out for an electronics shop, my main reason for being out this morning was to try and fix my freaking TomTom. When I left the shopping centre I nearly had to look twice at the driver of this car, but of course in a few seconds I realised I was in the USA, so the ‘passenger’ could not be thought of as the driver eh!

I went to 3 different shops, not one of which had a soldering iron that I could use myself, in fact most of them had no idea what I was talking about!!! Talk about the throwaway society, they have no electronics technicians around here!! As I wombled down the road I spotted a bike shop across from a closed down electric repair shop on College Road, I thought, well, surely he may be able to help I mean he is a biker after all, so I stopped and asked!

Well, I must say that after I explained my position the owner was so very helpful, he set me up in back with a soldering iron, of course I provided my own solder(they have a thing here with a tin of flux and plain solder, I am used to flux core filled solder, for normal people this will make no sense, but this is my diary OK) and I soon did what I thought may solve my connection problems with the TomTom. Basically, I just added a dab of solder to all 4 connection pads on the back of the TomTom Rider 2, which made them more prominent and I hoped would alleviate the loss of connection I was getting while riding over, well, any type of roads up here!!

I have to here say thank you very much to Thunder Road bike shop on College Road, I was given the run of the workshop and a very friendly welcome by the owner. For someone to offer mechanical and technical help without expecting money is a big bonus for any rider, so I can definitely recommend this shop. I ended up buying a new pair of sunnies anyway, the last pair had been destroyed by incoming bugs, so I was back to using my backup pair which are not that good anymore!

From here I continued on as I needed some other things. I had bought a pack of 25DVDs at a local Radio Shack, but I now needed some soft, or paper sleeves for them, I managed to do this also and I also bought a USB HDD which was sorely needed. I had copied all my music back home onto my iPod, but I had used my PC at home, so whenever I plugged in my iPod to my laptop, it wanted to ‘sync’ but this meant deleting everything off and starting over, well there was no more space on my laptop to do this, so it was a good opportunity to get this sorted and also to back up my laptop, photos etc.

The afternoon was spent getting that sorted, installing a copy of Garmin Mapsource(world map) that I had acquired and getting started on writing up a backlog of blog entries.

It was not until a lot later that evening we decided to go for a beer, we went into the downtown area and found a nice bar called the Mecca, the only issue with this place was that everyone smoked, the bushfire smoke was bad enough, this place had extras!

After a couple here we headed back to drink at the dorm, I bought some ice as I intended to have some of the rhum I had bought, but when I got back it turns out the 6 pack of coke I had bought had been stolen from the fridge, arseholes!!!! I ended up buying some from the vending machines, so the night continued, just a few rums, a bit of music and some chat.

Day 30 miles and 48 km
Trip – 29,190 miles and 46,976 km

Cheers
TravellingStrom

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