First week

Wow!
What a week, time goes so fast!

We left Tom´s place on Wednesday, the aim of the day was to find a car. For that we went downtown, we thought that Fairbanks isn´t a big city and that we could manage to walk the all way between SNAP office and downtown. I think that now we know :D! It´s a long walk especially in -20c. Anyway that was a good way to discover Fairbanks and its surrounding, to notice as well that it´s pretty hard to be a walker in Fairbanks : it´s very hard to cross the streets and the sidewalks are full of snow.
We visited a few car lots around the place but the prices were too high for us. Then went as well to the information center where they had a nice exposition about the life in Alaska, native people...
At the end of the day it was time for us to take place in the Scott´s car... heading to Two Rivers. We will have an article and even probably several articles about the life in Two Rivers, the live of Scott and his family there... There are thousands of stuff to learn from them.

The road to go there is just amazing! We left the city mile by mile and ended up on a snowy private road, in the middle of the huge Scott´s property. Our cabin will be available on Monday so until that we will be staying in a nice small cabin beside the Scott´s house.
The week was pretty crazy so we didn´t take pictures but we will for sure. We will as well describe the life there and our cabin in few weeks.
Thursday and Friday were as well dedicated to the car research without success. We can confirm that everyone is really helpful here, in SNAP office, in the information center, the people from international office..

Taking the bus here is really funny, every one talks to you and try to help you. We had a nice discussion with a native, he was telling us that his father was delivering the mail along the Yukon river by sledging, and that is how he lost his legs by frostbite. I think that´s the specificity of Fairbanks, you can meet people from all over Alaska, all over USA and all over the world with different stories, that´s pretty amazing.
We are now in Anchorage, waiting for the departure of Iditarod tomorrow morning.

It´s sometimes hard to realize where we are. For me (Julien) I really realized that I´m in Alaska when we came back from Scott´s place on Thursday morning. The colors were amazing all over the road, we saw the mountains of the Alaska range and then we arrived in Fairbanks, small smoky city in the middle of the hills.

The next post will probably be about Iditarod with lot of pictures I´m sure!

Getting started...

After nice, needed rest and first bagel breakfast, we headed to Fairbanks to see the town and getting started with life here.

The first thing we learned was that you could do almost everything by drive-in here. Not just the typical fast food, but also coffee and breakfast, and funny enough, ATM! Opening a bank account wasn't included in drive-in services, so for that we went to bank office and with help from our excellent guide Tom we managed to open a bank account. Service there was very friendly and everybody seemed to be very excited when they heard were we came from :).

After visiting the bank we drove around the UAF (University of Alaska fairbanks) campus area, and saw a moose there! In Finland they are not normally into science but we expected things being different in Alaska anyway :).
Then we visited our work, SNAP (Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic Planning) office to see the people there and to show we managed to arrive in Fairbanks. The office seemed very nice, the atmosphere warm and everybody welcome us with big smiles!

After SNAP we headed at a car rental place since our plan was to rent a car at least for the first months. That turned out to be more difficult than we expected so we are still figuring that out and we'll let you know how it turns out.

After visiting these places our heads were spinning. It seems our heads have a limit of receiving information in English while still feeling jet lag. Lucky for us, but not maybe for him, Tom was with us. Having a local explaining how the systems roll was very helpful, though we found all the people very friendly and helpful too.

So we headed home and had a nice dinner with Melissa and Tom. We spent some time sharing thoughts about our countries and cultural differences and also sharing Chartreuse, French herb alcohol that everybody seemed to enjoy.

After having a walk with the two dog, Elka and Wader, these two travellers were ready for bed and fell asleep feeling happy to be in Alaska.

Welcome in Alaska

Hello from Fairbanks!
We arrived last night in Fairbanks after a 30 hours travel, we saw pretty nice landscape through the windows of the plane, especially above Canada.
We are now at Tom's place which is a nice house in the middle of forest, where we got some rest. The temperature is -15°C and it's a bit snowy. There is lot of snow on the ground, about 40cm.
Heading now to city center to try to find a cheap car and find a bank. So the life here is starting.
See you :D!
Piia and Julien