Alaska 2011: May 4-6 - Crossing the Great Plains

This is the second page of our Alaska 2011 trip. The first page is here.

Shake and Rattle, but thankfully no roll

We woke up Wednesday morning to a howling wind. Forecast only called for 30 mph but it was definitely stronger than that. To top it off, we had some electrical problems in the coach - most of the outlets were dead, and every time we reset the breaker, it popped again. So it was starting out to be not such a good day.

We took care of our business at Blue Ox, and then ended up calling Holiday Rambler where we learned that there is a reset button on the inverter. When we reset that, everything was fine. But the wind problem did not go away. We decided it was too windy to be out on the road, so we arranged to stay another night before taking off.

What do you do in Pender, NE?

The answer is not much. The town is about 10 blocks square. Blue Ox is the major industry, and the biggest business seemed to be a really big John Deere dealer. They did have a city park with exactly one geocache, but that didn't take long.

We ended up driving over to a state park we had spotted near the border, with a Lewis & Clark exhibit. Turns out the park was still closed for the winter, so there wasn't much to see. But there was this really amazing stump. Except for the roof someone added, it's all real. I think a whole family of gnomes could live comfortably in there.

On the road again

Thursday brought calmer winds, so we continued North on I-29. Surprisingly, we actually saw some "leftover" snow that had not yet melted. It was in spots that probably would have attracted deep drifts, and protected so it would melt slower. This was our longest driving day so far, at 384 miles.

Friday was more of the same. A few more patches of snow as we got farther north, but mostly just a lot of nothing. We stopped a little west of Bismarck. We are now over 1,000 miles total for the trip, which puts us just over 1/4 of the way to Fairbanks. The Western half of North Dakota actually has a few places to see, so we will do a little sightseeing the next few days.