Santa Clause House and escaping Alaska!

We had planned to leave Fairbanks before midday, but true to the salsa spirit it was about 1pm when we set off. After filling up with fuel and buying a 1 and a half pint cup of coffee for $1.49 we were on our way. About half an hour out of fairbanks we stopped for a visit at Santa Clause House, in North Pole an entirely Christmas themed town!
Ok so Santa's House is pretty much a large gift shop with just about everything christmassy imaginable crammed onto the shelves amidst multitudes of beautifully decorated christmas trees!! There are christmas songs playing throughout the store, a christmas cd collection including 'feliz navidad'...yep, you guessed it, salsa christmas songs!! There was also a superb century old sleigh in pride of place...just by the entrance to santa's chair!! And guess what...it was apparently Mrs Claus's day to keep a check on the elves and reindeer so Santa himself was wandering about the store!! It would have been rude not to say hello to him in his own home, so we went to say hi and Santa commented on Andy's 'to salsa or not to salsa' t-shirt, saying that he liked dancing and that the local children learnt to dance at school round there....perhaps our education system should add salsa to its curriculum too?! After that we drove almost 200 miles to the border, which we crossed at Beaver Creek at around 6pm. The scenery along this stretch of road is incredible with a constant backdrop of the mountains. It is interesting to note that the mountains on the left of this road are all green and covered in trees, whilst those on the right are white and covered in snow, with many lakes appearing and disappearing through the vegetation on either side. As it was starting to get dark we spotted something on the side of the road... It was a huge grizzly bear!! We hung around for a while to watch whilst the bear stubbornly refused to stay still long enough for a good picture. Eventuallly we decided to push on, but only about half a mile down the road we spotted something else, this time it was a huge owl standing on the side of the road, there was plenty of wildlife about at this time of day as we saw rodents scurrying across the road on several occasions before we finally stopped for the night at about 12:30am.