Day 16

First thing this morning we went to Yukon Harley Davidson to buy shirts. They didn't have any good looking shirts in Jan's size, only camo shirts with skulls & crossbones and others equally as attractive. Needless to say, we didn't buy any shirts - it was disappointing.

We parted ways with Jerry & Nancy for today. We wanted to go to Dawson City which was about a 5 hours drive. They didn't want to spend the whole day in the truck so they went to Destruction Bay. We'll all meet up again tomorrow in Tok.

As I said, we drove for 5 hours to get to Dawson City but it was well worth it. We had rain off and on all day but that was okay - it washed off some of the mud from the last rain. The terrain went from farms and meadows to forests that were mostly Aspen trees with a few pines sprinkled in. Part of the trip looked kind of like the White Mountains with a lot of Aspens.

There are a lot of people on motorcycles and Jan is very jealous. He keeps talking about what a great motorcycle trip this would be and he's going to have to talk to the boys to see if they're up for it. There was a couple at the RV park on a Goldwing pulling a tent trailer. I was amazed at how big that tent was. Maybe the Harley guys could have the Goldwing guys pull tent trailers for all of them to camp in. I'm sure the Goldwing guys wouldn't mind at all.

Dawson City is an old gold rush town and they've done well in maintaining that history. A number of historic homes and buildings have been restored and are part of a visitor's tour of the city. Most of the streets are still dirt. As we drove in, we noticed strange piles of rock and sandy dirt that just did not fit in with the landscape. It turns out those piles are the tailings from the gold mining. Dawson City is also where the Klondike & Yukon Rivers come together - beautiful.

We drove past 3 RV parks on the way in to town but rejected them because the RVs were all parked so close together. Well, we ended up in the last one in town and it looks more like a parking lot than an RV park. Our trailer is 28 ft. and we're parked in the middle of huge trailers and bus style motorhomes. We look so tiny. We are totally amazed at the number of RVs traveling through Canada and Alaska. We don't encounter a lot of them on the road (so far) but the parks sure are full. We also noticed we run into the same people from park to park.

Tomorrow we're heading for Chicken, Alaska - it should be interesting.