They made it: 59 days to Fairbanks

A retired farmer and his wife drove their tractor from Nebraska to Alaska to raise money for children’s medical research.

It took 59 days for Dick and Carolee Ourada to travel nearly 4,000 miles on their 1977 IHC 574 tractor — from their first stop at the Titan Machinery Case-IH dealership in Imperial, Neb., on July 12, all the way to their home in Fairbanks, Alaska.

When they left Imperial, temperatures were in the 100-degree F range. By the time they arrived in Fairbanks, it had dropped down into the 40s and 50s, and Dick had to go to a Walmart and buy a sweatshirt.

Funds for medical research

The whole trip was designed to raise money for children’s medical research at Children’s Hospital Foundation in Denver, a facility that had saved the lives of family members of the Ouradas. But along the way, Dick and Carolee had some adventurous days on the road, and met many new friends who showed them great kindness and generosity and will not soon be forgotten.

“We’re back in Fairbanks now,” says Dick, a retired Venango, Neb., farmer, “and we are busy getting things ready for winter here.” The Ouradas maintain a shop and home in Holyoke, Colo., as well as a home in Fairbanks and another homestead under construction outside Fairbanks.

“We’ve driven that same trip about six or seven times,” Dick says. “But we hadn’t really seen it before. To me, the Alcan Highway was just a bad road you had to drive to get out of here. But after driving it on a tractor at 20 miles per hour, you can really see your surroundings.”

He could look out of the cab of the tractor and see both sides and into the ditches. While they didn’t observe much wildlife on the trip, except for a few caribou and one bear, they did witness the true beauty of the landscapes. Dick knew how dry it was through most of Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

“When we got to Alberta, it got a lot better,” he says. “Seeing the mountains, when the sun would hit the mountains directly, they looked absolutely white and snow-covered, and really beautiful. But when it was cloudy, they turned gray.”

Travelers along the Alcan Highway don’t notice those things at 60 mph, he notes.

Adventures along the way

Carolee, who followed Dick in their Winnebago motorhome, says the roads have improved over the years and are now asphalt the entire way, but they did encounter terrible potholes and some bad road conditions that knocked their little trailer from its ball hitch.

“It didn’t go far because we had a safety chain,” Dick says. But that was just one of the many little incidents the couple had during their nearly two-month trip.

When Dick was busy fixing a broken taillight on their trailer, an oil-field worker and his family came to their rescue and insisted on helping them fix the problem. When they needed a specific size of bolts to fix another issue, a worker in one village helped them find bolts that would work and allowed them to borrow his expensive pipe wrenches to fix the problem.

“That’s the way the whole trip went,” Dick says. “The little problems we had, there was always someone there to help, and they wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Newfound friends offered tours of their farms, museums and attractions in local towns. Farmers offered rides into town or tools. Machinery dealerships helped fix little issues with the tractor. Everyone pitched in to keep the Ouradas on the road and on schedule.

“I’m 82 years old,” Dick says. “We traveled with a 45-year-old tractor and a 38-year-old Winnebago, and we made it OK.”

Although the trip is complete, the Ouradas are still trying to raise more money from their efforts for the hospital and children’s medical research. “People can still donate to the cause,” Carolee says.

If you would like to learn more about their trip and their charity, visit tractortrip.com.