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The plan for this trip was to head for Chena hot springs and stay there for a couple of days. Chena hot springs is about 50 miles northeast of Fairbanks. However, as plans do, ours changed.
It took us a couple of days to get going as we are moving more slowly in the evening of our lives. We did not have any specific time table for this trip anyway. The primary purpose of the trip was to relax and enjoy each other's company.
Our first day out on the George Parks Highway found an annoying, if not worrisome, noise coming from the engine compartment. We stopped for our first night in a small place where we could connect with an auto mechanic the next morning.
The problem turned out to be a bad bearing in the alternator. The mechanic had to make a run to town to get a new alternator. We had him get new belts also. It took most of the morning to get the job done. But then we were on our way again and feeling a bit better with new truck parts. No more noise either.
The rest of the trip to Chena hot springs was peaceful enough.
However .....
When we
arrived, we found that it had turned into a tourist conglomerate. For starters,
the place was crawling with people. Not peaceful at all. Just inside the gate
there was a large dirt area
which produced a lot of dust with all the traffic (cars and people) over it.
In addition, they wanted
$20.00 per night for a camp site, all of which were small and close together. It didn't
take us long to realize that this was not what we wanted. We promptly turned around
and left.
We found a nice spot on the Chena river to camp and fish a little. It was nice and quiet with only a couple of groups around early in the evening. After that, we were alone and it was very quiet and peaceful. And it was free!
We decided to alter the rest of our trip by taking the old Richardson Highway back to Anchorage. It turns out that the Richardson highway is more scenic than the George Parks Highway anyway, at least in my opinion.
The trip was very relaxing and we enjoyed each other's company as well as the magnificent scenery Alaska has to offer. Mark even managed to do a little fishing and he even caught a couple.
I hope you all enjoy the pictures as much as we enjoyed being there.
For those that are interested...
These pictures were taken with my Panasonic DMC-FZ10 digital camera. It has 4 mega pixels with a Lumix lens. The camera is circa 2004. It has a 12x optical zoom and a 36x digital zoom. I have the digital zoom turned off. The millimeter equivalent of the optical zoom is about 35 wide to 450 telephoto. It is a continuous zoom, all with the single lens. It really pulls the images in close.
The resolution of the pictures when taken was 2304 by 1728. However, those chosen for this Internet show were reduced to one quarter their original size. This reduces the quality a bit, but the download time is reduced considerably. I still have the original versions on my computer.
This web page was created by hand, including all the sub-window processing. I did not use any web creation tools. After all, web programming is my profession.