‘Pedouin’ family takes time to smell the artichokes

WASILLA — After wintering in a cabin 24 miles from Fairbanks with no water, no electricity and no car, the Harrison family — who last passed through the Mat-Su Valley on a custom bicycle built for five — is back in a bus this time.

The family has converted a 1960 Chevy bus, retired from Air Force service, into a drivable home and says they now plan to travel the country selling copies of their self-published book, “A Pedouin Life: Stop and Smell the Artichokes.”

“It’s an American product and we like that,” said Bill Harrison.

Metro Café let the family park the bus and their bicycle built for five in front of the business and sell and sign copies of the book there Thursday, he said. The family hopes to sell 100,000 copies of their adventure story as an avenue to fund further travel, Bill said.

“We want to travel the world helping people,” he said. “People help us. We help them.”

Starla Brewer lives along the Parks Highway in Houston and was one of several people who met the family in July 2010 when they biked through, and who stopped at the café Thursday to buy the book and have it signed.

Brewer said she’s followed the family’s story since she lived in Oregon and saw a story there about the bicycle shop that crafted their $17,500 bike.

In the interim, she moved to Alaska and was thrilled to discover through their website pedouins.org that they would ride past her driveway at Mile 52.9 of the Parks Highway en route to Fairbanks.

She said she watched their progress though the GPS tracker on their website so she’d know the exact moment of their approach.

“I wanted to peg when I should go down to the end of my driveway with my camera,” Brewer said.

Their current digs they found abandoned along the Steese Highway and purchased from its owner for $500, Bill said.

To finance that purchase, he said they used money daughters Cheyenne, 8, Jasmine, 6, and Robin, 4, earned from crafting and selling purses, with help from their mom, Amarins Harrison.

Bill said someone in Fairbanks loaned the family a treadle sewing machine and the girls used that to sew 47 purses, which they then sold through their website.

“They bought the bus,” he said.

The Harrison family left Fairbanks in their 1960 C60 Viking Chevrolet bus with 31,000 miles and a newly rebuilt engine at 9:07 a.m., July 31.

The engine itself is a good example of the sort of synergy that has kept this adventure going, Bill said.

When the bus needed a new engine, their friend George Bickel from CHS Machine Shop in Wake Forest, N.C., came to their rescue. He had a newly rebuilt 292 engine they could have and a friend in the shipping business trucked the engine part way. Then Bill said he had a connection that was able to carry the engine the rest of the distance.

Total cost for the newly rebuilt engine and shipping from North Carolina: $40.

“It’s just been amazing,” Bill said.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.