Day Thirty: Watson Lake

This would be a really short travel day, as it was only a few hours between the campgrounds.  However, we had a deadline, as Mo wanted everyone to walk over together to hang the sign.  Mine was as ready as I could get it.  I had put two eye screws into the back and put some heavy gauge wire to hang it with.

Before pulling out, one of the ladies in my group got my attention.  Joyce had been up early, and what did she see out of her window?  This:

Maybe he broke my window?

We pulled out of Liard and hit the road.  I still didn’t realize I had no SD card in my camera, so my pics of this part of the journey are few.  Wendy H. let me borrow her SD card for the pics I would have had….

The Alaska Highway meanders over the B.C. and Yukon borders, but we were finally solidly in the Yukon.

I pulled into Watson Lake to an absolute downpour.  We had to back in; Mo was there to help me, and he was soaked to the skin.  It rained really hard for about 15-20 minutes.  Then I had to get unhitched in mud.  Fun times.

When it was time, I grabbed my sign and off we went to the signpost forest.  This was started by a soldier working on the Alaska highway from Danville, Illinois.  He was homesick and put up a sign pointing the direction of home for him and the approximate mileage.  Soon other soldiers were doing the same.  Today, it’s a ritual for people traveling on the Alaska highway to post their own sign.  I saw some very professional ones, and some….not so professional. Like a plastic plate with a sharpie.  But there are now over 90,000 signs.  They add more posts to keep adding new ones.  It’s pretty cool.

I was told that I needed to have my sign mounted by screwing holes through it, not the wire and eye bolts that I’d prepared.  It was mounted above the Open Range sign that one guy brought.  There were some issues mounting it, but it’s up and not going anywhere.

That was basically it for Watson Lake.  I prepared my roll ups, and we had quite the delicious dinner that evening.  Went to bed, ready to do a relatively long drive to Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, the next morning.

I did want to mention one more thing.  Canadian money is just cool.  The bills have a transparent stripe with holographic material making a pattern; I imagine this is very difficult to counterfeit.  And of course there are no one or two dollar bills; there’s the Loonie and the Toonie.  The Loonie is $1; Toonie is $2.  The bills are so colorful.  I just really like the way they look. There are no pennies, so if your item costs $1.92 and you pay with a $5, you’ll get a Toonie, a Loonie and a dime in change.  They just round to the nearest 5.

I’ve had to collect quite a few Loonies in order to do laundry.

Facing another long drive tomorrow.  A lot happened in Whitehorse, so hopefully I’ll have time and bandwidth to catch up more when I get to Dawson City tomorrow.