Day 15, July 18
Dawson City to Whitehorse YT
331 miles
The sound of rain hitting the windows wakes us at 6am. Rain??? What! No way, it was beautiful yesterday! But rain it is, and hard rain too. We look outside and in the parking lot the bikes are an island in the middle of a lake.
Oh no. Up here they coat dirt roads with calcium carbonate to keep the dust down. When it gets wet, it’s slick as snot. I can’t ride on snot. Mike can (he can ride on anything!), but I’m just not skilled enough. Maybe if we only had 20 miles of dirt today, I could soldier through, but there’s no way I could possibly do 477 miles of this.
Seriously depressed (and still very worn out from the last 2 weeks on the road), we fall back asleep.
A few hours later we get up and try to decide what to do. It’s still raining harder than ever. Mike goes down to the lobby to see if there are any rooms available for tonight, but they’re booked solid – so is every other hotel in town. Camping in this downpour is not an option. We need to move on, and the only safe way out of town is the paved road away from where we want to be.
We sit down with maps and tour books. Our eyes land on the huge Great Slave Lake about 3 days ride away. It’s not the Arctic Circle, but it looks pretty cool, so we pack up and wade out to the bikes to load up and get the heck out of Dodge…er…Dawson!
After some final gift purchases and a stop at the Post Office to mail them, we head down the road in the rain.
Fifty miles out of town the rain stops, it’s all headed North – the way we wanted to be going too. We’re headed southeast, back towards Whitehorse. At lunch, I tell Mike to call and make reservations for something in Whitehorse, I’m not staying at Casa Loma again! He calls the Visitors Center and some insane person says there’s tons of rooms available, don’t worry about it. Harumph. I’m not happy, but we continue on.
When we get in to Whitehorse, everything is, of course, full. I throw a tantrum, and somehow Mike is able to find a room at the incredibly nice Yukon Inn. The price is right, and the room is big, new and beautiful. I have no idea how he did it, I probably don’t want to know!
mikefalcioni.com 