RVing

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Good-bye, Farewell, and Amen

It’s a strange atmosphere here this week, frantically busy even as the tourist season is shutting down. We’re hosting the road crew paving Front Street, so the motel is bursting at the seams while the RV park is eerily empty. Nights are cool and days are sunny.  People are leaving in droves by RV, helicopter, motorcycle, truck, car, even horse. No one’s left by garbage truck yet, though. Points if you get the joke/reference on that last one. 🙂

Dawson is quickly shutting down. My favourite restaurants are closed, including the ice cream parlour. It’s very sad to go into town on a sunny afternoon and not be able to get a cone of Rolo ice cream to eat while I watch the ferry go back and forth across the Yukon!

At work, the staffing calendar marks Saturday as my last day, with a big frowning face with tears running down its cheeks; the manager’s attempt at making me feel guilty even though I stayed three months longer than planned!!! I’ve had four jobs since I left last year. One failed miserably, one was tolerable, and two were winners. I have high hopes for my winter on Vancouver Island.

I still have some preparations to make, but for some reason detrenchment this time around is feeling very easy.

Today, I took advantage of the manager’s very generous offer of the industrial washers to wash all my bedding. While that was tumbling around, I cleaned the ‘bedroom’, getting rid of a mountain of books and magazines, dusting, vacuuming, mopping up water on the sills with my Bissell carpet cleaner (for which I have discovered another purpose), and getting rid of the curtains seeing as I discovered that the window-side of them was mouldy!!! I’ll do without proper curtains for now seeing as a complete makeover of that area is in order this winter. The cats were delighted with the new open space and spent the afternoon spread out on their blanket enjoying the 180 degree view of the park.

The generator is probably fixed; a fresh tank of fuel will confirm this. I’m ecstatic!!! Learning how to do proper maintenance on this thing is making me eager to learn how to do the oil changes on my vehicles as well.

The next big RV chore on my list is to flush out my water system with chlorine and then fill the onboard tank completely seeing as I hate the water in Watson Lake. 🙂 It’s pretty bad here (overly chlorinated) but that’s better than the iron-rich water down south that stains everything!

Inside, I’m doing a major cleaning and purging so I can take advantage of the Free Store. I already have a huge bag of clothing and sundry items to take there. I’ve been donating extra books to the RV park book exchange seeing as I’ve made full use of it this summer.

Sunday, I’ll pull out when I pull out. I hope to get to Whitehorse, but I won’t push myself. I’ve been working six hours a day seven days a week and I’m beat. I might make it to just shy of Whitehorse on Sunday, allowing me to get into the city early enough Monday to run errands and be on my way again. There won’t be another decent grocery store until Prince George, so it would be wise to stock up especially since I’ll be in Watson Lake a couple of weeks.

My bank account is much too lean for the journey ahead, but I will make do. Things will be so different next year when I leave Vancouver Island knowing just when my next pay cheque will be. I can finally budget properly.

This new life of mine is slowly coming together. My Klondike summer might be drawing to a close, but a new adventure is not far ahead and this satisfies me greatly.

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Generator Update

I discovered back in early May that my generator was no longer working. I didn’t think too much about it over the summer since the funds to have someone look at it just weren’t there. I was bitterly disappointed to not have it for my trip south, but figured that any money I sank into it would be greater than the cost of the occasional night at a campground.

One of my colleagues at the park is an electrical engineer and I finally worked up the nerve to ask him to have a look at for me. He came to the same conclusion as I did (!), that the problem was in the area of the brushes, which needed to be cleaned out.

Taking out an onboard generator is a huge undertaking, so I began to explore the idea of having it removed for salvage and buying a small portable generator. But the low number of hours on the Kohler made me unhappy about this option.

A few people told me to ‘whack’ the motor compartment, but I thought they were joking until my colleague suggested the same thing! He told me to hold down the start switch and give the motor a good whack with a heavy hammer.

I had nothing to lose by this point, so I did as he instructed. Nothing. I released the start switch, repositioned the hammer, hit the start switch and… the motor turned over!

The genset still won’t start, but my colleague claims that it’s ‘fixed’; all that’s needed now is to get some fresh fuel to the carburator.  I might need to take it apart and clean it as well as blow out the fuel line, but those are easy things to do.

To be continued…

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The Dawson City Youth Hostel (and miscellanea)

Before I talk about the Dawson City Youth hostel, I just have to share a picture of a find I made at the thrift store last Saturday after the outhouse race! There is a special at the thrift store the first Saturday of the month where you can stuff (and I do mean stuff!) a grocery bag with anything and pay just $5.

CIMG0207

My keyboard preferences are set to French-Canadian, which more often than not makes my numeric keypad useless since it converts the period to a comma. Moreover, have you ever tried to do bookkeeping on a laptop keyboard?! A ‘proper’ calculator has been on my list of wants for a long time, but I just couldn’t justify the cost for the use it’d get. What a find!

So, that complete randomness aside (I’m trying to combine posts due to my limited online time), today I went to visit my friend Gé, who lives with her husband in a 20′ school bus. They are on a two-year honeymoon! Their first year was spent getting to Dawson by way of just about all of Canada and Alaska (or so it seems) and now they are off to spend the winter in Costa Rica! They completely outfitted the bus themselves, using whatever materials they could find. The result is a rustic and cozy cottage.

My favourite part of their bus conversion is the mini woodstove! They stow it away when it’s warm and then reinstall it when it gets cold:

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The stove is installed safely with a chimney:

the chimney adds an adorable touch of whimsy!

the chimney adds an adorable touch of whimsy!

Since they don’t rely on hookups, they favour more rustic parking locations. After spending some time at Bonanza Gold (where we met as colleagues for a brief time), they have moved across the Yukon River to the youth hostel located in West Dawson.

The hostel has to be seen to be understood. From a distance, it looks like a pile of bric-à-braque, but the set up is really very well done. There is no running potable water or electricity, but there are interesting bathhouses, seats with a view, and plenty of opportunities to chop wood. I didn’t get to see the cabins, but I think tenting there would be very nice even if it’s one of the more expensive places to tent near Dawson (Bonanza Gold is the cheapest).

This is the shower! Creek water is pumped into the barrel to the left and used for bathing after...

This is the shower! Creek water is pumped into the barrel to the left and used for bathing after…

being heated in this wood stove! (guests chop their own wood!)

being heated on this wood stove! (guests chop their own wood!)

Gé loves this system, saying that the water heats up quickly and makes the room very hot and steamy.

The owner has thought of everything to make his guests’ rustic stay more comfortable:

a covered drying area

a covered drying area

lockable cubbies for long-term tenters

lockable cubbies for long-term tenters

comfy chairs to

comfy chairs to

take in the view

take in the view

Finally these signs caught my attention:

I can cross off numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, and 16!

I can cross off numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, and 16!

Off my list now are 18 and 21 (26 would have happened if they operated on normal and not Dawson time; ie. if they were open when the schedule says they should be open!)

Off my list now are 18 and 21 (26 would have happened if they operated on normal and not Dawson time; ie. if they were open when the schedule says they should be open!)

Done are 28, 30 (my favourite thing to do in Dawson!), 31, and the bonus!

Done are 28, 30 (my favourite thing to do in Dawson!), 31, and the bonus!

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And the countdown is on…

I’m leaving Dawson in no more than exactly two weeks from now as I’m expected back at Nugget City around the 23rd.

I’d hinted last spring that by September I would have a major decision to make regarding Watson Lake, and that decision was made months ago. I was so fortunate this summer to get adopted by two wonderful hotel/RV park/restaurant complexes that have made my decision to use the Yukon as my homebase so easy. But when you live on site, you need a place to go to to unwind. Watson Lake really doesn’t have much to offer in that regard; no good restaurants, no cozy pubs, no entertainment. It’s ugly, poor, and crime ridden. Dawson is the complete opposite. Watson Lake is a place to stay, Dawson is a place to live. If the two towns were even remotely comparable, the decision of which to use as a homebase would have been gut wrenching rather than easy to make.

Depending on the weather at Nugget City and the amount of work there, I’ll stay anywhere from two to three weeks as I’m expected in Campbell River on October 23rd. I’m hoping to take a slightly different route south and to spend a day or two in Vancouver, but the pace to Campbell River will definitely not be leisurely.

I look forward to my new adventures, but, darn it, it’s tougher than I would ever have imagined to say goodbye to the Klondike.

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Yukon Beers

I’ve had the pleasure of sampling many local brews in my year-long cross-country journey, but it’s the beers of the cleverly named (note the sarcasm) Yukon Brewing Company that have succeeded in ‘wowing’ me the most by surpassing the excellent offerings from Quebec’s Unibroue (located in the town where I grew up!).

The Yukon Brewing Company has seven beers, of which I’ve tried four (so far!). They are:

  • Chilkoot: this is a lager, quite acidic with a spicy finish. I don’t care much for it for sipping on its own, but it’s fantastic when paired with food, from simple burgers or pizza to salmon and rice. Appropriately enough, it is the beer I’ll always associate with my Klondike summer. Ordering it with dinner has become such a habit that I ordered it without thinking the night we came off the Chilkoot trail!
  • Espresso Stout: this is a dark ale and my best beer discovery ever! It matches two of my favourite things; a dark ale and coffee! It has replaced Guiness as my beer of choice for pairing with fish ‘n chips or just for sipping on a lazy Sunday afternoon while curled up with a good book. It is incredibly smooth and creamy.
  • Yukon Gold: this is a pale ale that is perfect for sipping on a patio. It pairs itself well with Yukon Jack whisky, another find this summer. This smooth ale is slightly spicy, but does not have the palate cleansing acidity of the Chilkoot. The finish is rather ‘hoppy’, which in my beer world is a good thing!
  • Yukon Red: this is an amber ale and my least favourite of the four as I find the finish too bitter. Ambers are usually my go-to beer when I’m not feeling too adventurous, but my two consumptions of this one have left me disappointed.

Still left to try are:

  • Cranberry Wheat Ale: someone would have to buy me this beer for me to try it as I have yet to find a wheat beer I like. The cranberries in this one do make me optimistic about it…
  • Discovery Ale: this honey-brown ale is made with honey from Yukon’s territorial flower, the fireweed. I’m looking forward to trying this one seeing as I recently discovered just how much I enjoy honey-brown ales… especially in beer bread!
  • Lead Dog Ale: this is another stout, which I’m sure I would enjoy. I’ve just been lured away from plain old stout since discovering stout with coffee!The inside of the bottles isn’t the only great thing about Yukon beers. Some of the labels are also works of art! Check them out, as well as the story behind each beer, on the Yukon Brewing Company’s website.(no, this post was not a paid advertisement for the YBC :D)