The last two days I did nothing much than sleeping, eating and maintaining my setup in the cozy environment of Amanda & Tom's house. The weather was bad so the motivation for exploring Fairbanks was low. A bit of a shame but I did bike around town a little bit this morning before heading towards the Georg Parks Highway in the afternoon.

After completing the Dalton - what must have seemed a little bit like a race to some people reading this (there was just nothing else to do than pedal all day, really) - I might switch gears now a little bit. I still have more than three weeks in Alaska before the Canadian border is expected to open for international traveller's. Plenty of time to explore much more here than I would have initially planned. The rough idea is to go to Denali now, potentially do some hiking and maybe ride the park road. After that I would take the Denali Highway eastwards (more mud, gravel and basically no traffic to come) and then head south to Valdez to see some Glaciers.

Today is my first really rainy day on the bike what made it particularly hard to leave the house this morning. Throughout the day rain usually doesn't bother me much. My rain gear does well. Since I am on paved roads now there is also no mud. I even manage to still cook with wood fire in my stove. It's the evenings (and mornings) that are much less pleasant with rain. Setting up the tent, bring all the moisture inside, nothing dries over night, stowing away the wet tent in the morning... It always takes a while for me to get used to this. With hopes that the weather will stay fairly stable until I can finally pedal myself to the south I sleep in about 100km before Denali.