RVing

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A Klondike Summer Draws to a Close

The summer of 2009 is one that will live in my heart for the rest of my life. It is drawing to a close as evidenced by the inky blanket of night that has returned and the days that are becoming cooler and wetter. The romantic part of me is sad to leave before winter sets in while the pragmatic part of me knows that leaving must now be foremost on my mind.

The fact that this is just a goodbye, not a farewell, makes the thought of departure bearable. I have nowhere near had my fill of the Klondike yet. This land has settled into my bones as firmly as it gripped my soul for a decade and I am afraid that I will never be free of it. It was here, at the end of a dream and at the very edge of the world, staring out into a land in which you could lose yourself that I found out what is truest about me. Some things I liked, some I didn’t, but I now know the stranger I once faced in the mirror every morning.

Tonight, I finally went for a walk down to Bonanza Creek, following a path that starts here at the RV park. It was a short stroll that took me through the essence of the Klondike, across dredge tailings and past mining equipment, reminding me that this was a land built on foolish dreams and honest labour. The land has been scarred by the miners searching for a yellow metal with no intrinsic value, but it is now inhabited by people who know that true wealth has very little to do with material riches.

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Foreign RVs

This summer, I have seen many class B motorhomes here in Dawson with European licence plates, most often Dutch and German. It is a sight to behold!

I spoke with one Dutch gentleman who told me that he came to Canada in the ’90s and paid about $5,000 to rent an RV for several months, plus several thousand dollars in penalties for going over the mileage limit. This year, he had his RV shipped from a port in Hamburg straight to Halifax for only about $3,000. There are companies in Germany who specialize in this, dealing with all the paperwork.

The Dutch RVer told me that his rig runs on European 220V power, so he has to rely on his alternator and a solar panel to recharge his battery. This works out well for him and saves him a ton on campground fees since he never needs a serviced site.

It’s no secret to me that people ship their RVs overseas, but to actually see a European RV makes the practise more tangible and reaffirms my desire to ‘trade down’ from Miranda in many years time to a class B so that I can ship my home across the ocean, too. 😀

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Busy Weekend at the RV Park

This should be our last ‘busy’ weekend of the season. It’s a long weekend called ‘Discovery Days’ to honour the 1896 discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek, without which there would have been no gold rush and no Dawson as we know and love it today.

The motel was fully booked for the whole weekend, so last night I ‘hung out’ at the office until most of the stragglers had come in. Normally, I would put keys in the door of the reserved rooms and put a list on a white board of who goes where. But when we are booked solid we are concerned about people ‘stealing’ rooms, so if at all possible, someone hangs out in the office until pretty late. Since I work the evening shift and start at a civilized hour, I was happy to stay late yesterday, finishing at 12:15AM, and then coming in an hour later than scheduled this morning (noon!).

Normally, the office ‘closes’ at 8, at which time I cash out and do the night audit, while remaining available for late check-ins and people needing change, and then I lock up at 9. Yesterday, there was a steady stream of people and phone calls until 11:45. I cashed out at midnight, once a lull set in. I couldn’t imagine staying that late at the office if it wasn’t busy, but the time flew by yesterday!

Tonight was much less manic and I got out at 9:30 since most of the people who booked in yesterday are staying the full weekend. I can’t even begin to count the number of calls I got enquiring about room availability. We’re full, town is full, and the Klondike Lodge 40km down the highway is also full. The nearest available rooms are in Tok or Whitehorse! We are doing steady business of people sleeping in their car or in a tent!

The season will start to wind down on Monday. Sometime early next week, I need to move to a site closer to the office because I will be taking the emergency phone home next weekend overnight and the signal doesn’t reach my present site. I would have had to move in a couple of weeks anyway as we will start to shut down sites and mine was on the list.

June passed so slowly, but the rest of the summer has flown by and I am shocked by how much I didn’t do that I had planned on doing! Hopefully, I can squeeze in one more mini road trip before I begin the long journey south to my winter home.

Crazy as these weekends can be, they are fun, too, and time goes by very quickly!

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Why Did I Become a Full-Timer

The question came up on an RVing forum I belong to as to why members of the group became full-timers and how our expectations have changed. Here is an expanded version of my reply:

I decided to become a full-timer because life as I was expected to live it did not work for me. I had tried to have a house and a career and a family and none of that fulfilled me completely. The richer I became materially, the more I felt convinced that something was seriously missing in my life and I finally accepted that the absolute only time that I’m happy is when I’m traveling.

However, I do like to have a ‘home’, so RVing seemed like the natural choice for combining both needs and also allowed me to have my cats with me. Moreover, I wanted to see my country, and eventually more of the US, at my own pace, as a local rather than a tourist.

A year into full-timing, I’ve discovered that I don’t like being on the go every day. I’m very happy to spend three or four months in one location, then spend two to four weeks traveling to another location. I figured this out very early on, actually, so I haven’t done nearly as much exploring in the past year as I would have expected. That said, I know some towns better than I ever expected I would and I would never in a million years have fallen in love with Vancouver had I not spent four months there.

Also, working on the road isn’t easy. Oh, work can be found for the willing just about anywhere, but it’s very hard to generate a stable source of income. Until I do, I will have to spend long periods of time in one place before I can move on to another. For a few months in late 2008 and early 2009 I thought that the blog was going to become a steady source of income, enough to make a dent in my budget, but that well has dried up completely. I’ve made the decision that I can no longer afford to treat the blog as a business and that I need to put my energy elsewhere for the time being. This won’t affect readers as I will continue to post as I always have, but there will be a lot less going on behind the scenes. (update on July 22, 2010: it’s amazing how quickly things can change if you’re persistent!)

Besides that, I think that the biggest expectation I’ve had to let go of is that I will roam freely. This won’t happen for several years. Right now, I need the security of a ‘homebase’ with a good job to return to for a good chunk of the year and to winter some place warmer where I can work. So, that means that I will spend the next few years learning every route between Dawson City and southern BC. But I’m okay with that, at least my home has wheels and I decide when I pull up the stakes.

Becoming a full-timer was without a doubt the only good decision I ever made in my life even if it was planned poorly and it has enabled me to fulfill many other dreams. It is the life I’m meant to lead.