several days

Several days have gone by since I was last able to post. I notice that the "misc" post doesn't have writing to explain the mysterious photos. That post was : We use Zote soap to wash our clothes. I got the bar of Zote in the 99 cent store. We wash them at night when we are in a hotel room....so we don't always get a chance to wash them. We have several towels but we prefer the "Packtowel" to the other travel towels and to the regular terry cloth towel that we brought. The hotel in Watson Lake was decorated in an interesting way. Red towels and sheets, 3 kinds of wall[paper on each wall, blue bathroom including blue shower tub combo, red frilly curtains (as advertised in the brochure).

From Watson Lake, we traveled to Whitehorse a lovely town. 30 miles or so outside of Whitehorse, I saw a sign for Carcross and remembered the Carcross desert from my www surfing. The Carcross Desert is the smallest desert in the world. The sign was for Carcross, but not the desert. We were at Jake's Corner a wide spot on the road with a gas station and diner. We stopped and verified that Carcross Desert did exist. We took a 3 hour detour (including stops) to Carcross to see the desert and the charming town that HAS been discovered by tourists. Not to worry, the desert is a couple of miles north of town and we had it pretty much to ourselves. Beeray ran from one end of the desert to the other and up to the top of the highest dune. She is strong and determined.

There are 25k of the 30k people living in the Yukon, that live in Whitehorse. Much of it is old but gleaming old. We arrived late and there were no rooms to be had. I was tired of driving and none of my cell phones had worked for 200 miles so we couldn't call around. I suppose that I could have used the phones at the lovely visitor's center, but I was tired, so we camped at Walmart with 30 or more other RVs. It was a different experience. There were some full timers and some new to RVing. I got help from a nice man (Mac and Bettye McBroom)who had been full time for 11 years. Mac showed me how to work RiVa's heater and refrigerator. He told me where to get propane. We saw our friends Mike and Brenda who are in the Road Less Traveled van.

We still hadn't decided if we were going to go to Tok through the sourthern route or going to head north through Dawson City and the "Top of the World" Highway. we were told that that weekend there was going to be 500 motorcycles in Dawson City. That settled it, there was no way that we would be able to find lodging, so we stayed on the southern route, staying on the Alaskan Highway. The road was misserable pretty much from Whitehorse to 20 miles beyond the USA border. The road between Whitehorse and Tok, our next stop, was rough. There are miles and miles and miles of frost surge which means the going is slow and even when slow is bone and RiVa shaking.

We stayed in Beaver Creek, just shy of the USA/Canada border. We stayed in Buckshot Betty's place. The rooms are clean log cabins. I wouldn't stay there again though. There was no telephone, no wifi (actually there was wifi, but it was secure and Buckshot Betty wouldn't give us the login info. Buckshot Betty is cranky. The rooms are $104. The people in the information center at Beaver Creek were friendly, as was the man in the museum just south of town and the miner who's claim we "jumped". The girls wanted to pan for gold and the man told us how to get to a place that has gold. We stopped at the creek and started to pan when a miner came by. Apparently we were on his claim but he smiled and told us to pan as long as we would like.

Crossing the USA border was pretty quick. The boarder guard asked us if we were carrying more than $10k, if RiVa was mine and looked at our passports.

Then on to Tok. Tok (pronounced Toke). We stayed at the Tundra RV Park because they were supposed to have wifi (a more and more urgent requirement). The truth was that they had spotty and pretty much unusable wifi so I couldn't log on. *sigh*. They also had one RVer at the camp that was playing his music really loud, long into the night. I turned on RiVa's fans to drown out the noise.

Were told by the nice lady at the gold nugget jewelry shop on the edge of Tok, that we should go to Mukluk Land for the girls to play and to pan for gold. Gold is guaranteed. The price of admission was $5 adult, $2 children and $5 for panning. George, the wonderful owner of Mukluk Land helped the girls pan. They got quite a bit of gold for our $5. It was a bargan. The girls played a ball throwing game and got candy for each set of points that they scored. We met a man who has been traveling in his RV since May. He runs a campsite review on the www:
www.rvparkreviews.com
He was a wealth of information. When we left Mukluk land George's wife (I didn't ever learn her name though we talked for an hour) gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She is a lovely lady. She and her husband have run Mukluk Land for 25 years. It is an eccentric collection of kid-friendly activities run by these two retired school teachers. A great place to visit with children!