Work

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Nugget City, Once More

I arrived last Tuesday at Nugget City at about 2:15. I was up a ladder priming a door by 2:45, and by 3:15, I had fallen off the ladder (its fault!) and was soaked in blood-red primer. Oh, it was good to be back. 😀

Last May, in my ignorance of all things telecommunications in the Yukon, I over-used the internet with just email, blog posting, and general surfing… to the tune of almost three hundred dollars!!! So, when I wasn’t able to get on to their network this time, I didn’t expect much sympathy and have been doing without the internet all week. The owners were very good about what happened in May, saying I should have been told that they  have such a low bandwidth amount. But I’d hate a repeat of that, so I’m posting from the library in town where it’s nice and safe. 🙂

I’ve been painting for a week solid. It’s very good for the ego to have people come up to me and say “Oh, you’re the painter!” 🙂 I’ve so far done three coats, plus primer, on a garage door, one side of a fence, and a dozen small flights of stairs. I need to do the other side of the fence, a second coat on both sides, a second coat on the stairs, and then at least two coats on a huge wall.

I was stopped yesterday and today by weather that has never been seen here by the owner: SNOW, and lots of it. It fell in big fat flakes all of yesterday and there is up to a foot in parts! I’ll need to do a few long days to make up for two days off and if the weather cooperates there is more than enough to keep me busy another two weeks here. I was glad for the forced rest because all the ladder climbing and squatting has been as hard on my knees as was the Chilkoot!

Being without the internet has made me discover just how long a day is! I’m not bored, far from it, but I’ve had time to watch Gone With the Wind AND reread the book! I’ve been cooking, baking, and doing other domestic chores, and I’m pretty sure I’m all caught up on my sleep. *makes a mental note to take an internet sabbatical more often*

The heater I bought in Whitehorse is fantastic. Between it and the larger unit, I have not had to turn on the propane yet and it’s cozy in the rig, not just tolerable.

I’m sure there’s more to say, but I only have 10 minutes left, so this will have to do. More next week. 🙂

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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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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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RV Park Guest Etiquette (or Rae Needs to Get Some Stuff Off Her Chest)

Here are some tips to be a better RV park guest:

1) If there is a big pink sign on the door that the office closes at say, 8, and you walk in at 8:10, don’t act all huffy that the camphost won’t let you surf for a half hour and be grateful that she allows you a few minutes to send off an ‘important’ email;

2) If checking in as a group, have one person per rig go into the office to register. If you go in en mass and start talking amongst yourselves (especially in a foreign language) and keep on interrupting the check in process to ask the host questions she said she would answer after everyone was checked in don’t get huffy if the check in process is slow and/or she forgets to give you the code for the wireless internet and/or she asks you the same question more than once;

3) Don’t shoot the messenger informing you that the internet is down. Shoot the idiot who crashed the system by trying to download a massive file;

4) If the camphost is counting money, please do her a favour and let her finish, especially if you plan to launch into a tirade about the internet.

5) If you are in, say, the men’s washroom and there is a knock at the door, answer. If you don’t, you have no business yelling at the female camphost who assumed there was no one in the room since no one answered the knock, and entered to make sure the facilities were clean and the toilet paper topped up.

There, I feel better. 😀

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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!