And down the road

The move went well.  I had  met with the drive in the days before and he had rigged up an iron plate taped to the roof of my van so that the beacon and an antenna could be mounted (magnetic things don't stick well to a plastic van) as I was to be the chase car for the move since not only did I need to be down on the property when it arrived, but it also was a savings of $300 (and if we like to do voodoo math, one could even say with the $1000 reduction on the price of the cabin, the move really only cost me the $300 for the lead pilot car and the forklifts on the Tok end of the move).  The cabin and shed were loaded either the day before or very early that morning, heavy cardboard was nailed up over the front facing windows and everything in it's place and secure when I arrived.  The last afterthought was to throw a few more blocks in the shed just in case they were needed to set the cabin on when we got down there.

The 200 miles went well, even one particularly tight spot where one lane of the Johnson River bridge was closed down for maintenance work (though it was a bit nerve racking to see the cabin head through that space with what seemed like only inches to spare against the bridge trusses).  By the time the truck had finagled it's way into the laneway (and despite cutting down a few trees it was still just a bit too narrow to manoeuvre the long trailer back through a dogleg in the laneway to the clearing) it was decided to unload at the power corridor.  First the Shed was taken off and driven back to a spot where there was space, it was convenient, yet out of the way and at some time in the future could easily be moved again.  Then it was time to fork up the cabin and have the truck pull out from under it.  At this point I thought they'd set it down, and relift it from the ends, but instead they simply chained up the runners to one of the forklifts, dragged it down the laneway, and then pushed it right into the spot where it was to go and set up the oil tank (and for me to put on the shut-off valve, the fill and vent risers and the level gauge as I had enough of climbing a ladder to stick an oil tank to find out how much fuel was remaining and somehow winding up with diesel fuel on me somewhere).  The day went well enough that the driver went off to get something to eat and headed back up the highway as it was still early enough for him to do so rather than having to stay over for the next day (and since he no longer had the cabin on the lowboy he also no longer needed a second pilot car).  All that was left for me was to head over to the power company to give them the go ahead to put in the new service since the cabin now was in place, arrange for the oil tank to be filled and head back to Fairbanks myself.

As I mentioned before, there was a race to get things done, and one of those, besides getting the cabin moved from North Pole, closing on the land and such, was also to get this accomplished before there was snow on the ground and things had started to freeze up.  This was close, as this was on the 6th of October, and on average we have snow on the ground for the duration of winter right around the end of the first week of October, and there also needed to be time for the power company to get the service in place or it would have brought most things to a stop until spring.

After this trip, I did get caught up in Fairbanks for at least two weeks with some issues on the van, but that's a story for another time.