Only a Day

The weather here up north is great. Last week, they said that it was in the mid-70s (°F) but not today.  The high 40s (°F) will probably be about it. There is still some ice on the ocean but it is mostly gone at least to the horizon. Upon arrival, I came to the BARC to start messing with the network again. They were having a barbecue when I arrived. Of course, it was the tail end so I had a black bean burger and a hot dog. Actually, the black bean burger wasn't bad at all.

One of the groups just received some supplies and it was packed in dry ice. Of course, the best way to dispose of the dry ice is to toss it into a puddle. This was pretty entertaining.

There is a conference going on here in the large conference room. They had a Subway lunch brought in. So I sort of jumped in line. I know many of the participants so it was easy to do.

The morning has been somewhat hectic. With a lot of phone calls and running around the building and NARL.

For the conference today, someone brought in some muktuk for the group to try since a common question for anyone who visits Barrow is "did you get to try whale?". 

Heading Further North

Heading north to Utqiaġvik for a short trip. Possibly my last one. And one of the few summer trips. The 34°F temperature may not sound much like summer, but at least it’s above freezing. ACS, the network contractor for UIC Science, has had their network running for several weeks and the challenge is to move the science experiments over one by one from the legacy network to the new network. The trick is, no one is actually there to do it.

I made a suggestion (again!) to simply bridge the two networks and have two layer 3 broadcast domains on the single Ethernet network. As it is, several VLANs already have multiple layer 3 networks running. So it’s nothing new but not what is normally done. So that is now the plan.

The first picture is the Fairbanks airport and the second is Deadhorse aka Prudhoe Bay. The airport is packed with people headed home after their shift. That’s why I just took a shot out the window. Once that plane left back towards Anchorage, I have a three-hour wait until my flight to Barrow.

More Broken Stuff

I guess I was wrong. The other casualty from the trip was me. I got home and was extremely tired and sore. Not too unusual I guess but I was feeling even worse 12 hours later. Since I am the only one at the house last night, I took myself to the emergency room before it became a problem. Very high blood sugar levels (for me) and severely dehydrated according to the doc. And I must’ve drank 3 quarts of water on the relatively short 4 hour trip.

I stopped at the Birch Lake turnout again as it really is a nice view. Had some snacks and more water before continuing on home. I arrived home a bit after noon and all I wanted to do was sleep. Anyway, at that point, I had sort of decided that I don’t want to do any long motorcycle road trips. At least in the near future. I don’t plan on going to the sidecar rally in Coeur d’ Alene, ID, since I don’t think I can take the multi-day, long distance ride. 

Stuff Breaks

There seems to be at least one casualty from the Top of the World Highway. The aluminum angle that I used for the steering damper mount broke from fatigue. I thought that may not be heavy enough but it’s lasted for quite a while. I need to look for some steel and possibly put in some gussets.

I took off this morning around 7:00 and there were dozens of RVs waiting to cross on the ferry. Fortunately, they have a separate line for small vehicles and it was only about a five minute wait. The border didn’t open until 9:00 PDT (8:00 AKDT) so there was almost no oncoming traffic, which was very nice. I arrived at the border about 15 minutes before they opened. Pretty quick with only a couple of questions.

I stopped  in Chicken for gas and some breakfast/lunch. The daily special was biscuits and gravy. With the five gallon gas tank, the Ural just doesn’t have enough range to make it all the way to Tok. And I filled up in Tok as there wasn’t quite enough gas to make it to Delta. I’m back at Thompson’s Eagle’s Claw motorcycle campground again. The Dawson City to Tok road took around six hours or only a 30 mph average. So I’m taking a break.