Thursday, May 26, 2016

Whitehorse, YT - Drivin' Along

We’ve gone 1700 miles

        our fan motor and fan belt came unbolted and fell into the engine - fixed in 4 hours

        a stone hit our windshield and we’ve got a crack that needs repair - fixed in 30 minutes

        a connector on our inverter rusted and one pin broke - Gary bought the part and fixed it in 2 minutes. (took longer to find the part in the store than to fix it.)

Can it get any better than this? However, our Alaska adventure is a little more adventurous than we had planned.

A friend of ours had a favorite saying: ‘Every problem can be fixed: some take time, some take money.’ We’ve found that some take both and our wallets are lighter but we’re still right on schedule to get to Fairbanks on the 30th.

You know, it could all be worse. We saw an RV being towed out of the RV park we’re in. They’ve got heftier problems than we do.

We traveled from Jade City on the Cassiar to White Horse on the Alaska Highway (I’m old school and am used to calling it the Alcan. Now, why ever did they take Canada out of the name since the road is in Canada?) About 335 miles. We had rain most of the way until we hit the shower part with intermittent rain. Rain is one thing, rain on a gravel road being repaired is something else. Keeping this road in good repair given the extreme conditions in the winter is difficult at best and impossible at worst. So, they work most of the summer to get the road ready. The road workers were out today in the rain.

Rain, did I say? Well what about the hail we saw coming down and the slush on the window here. Hmm. Looks like we drove through more than rain.
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Even our back-up camera up near the roof of the RV got dirt on it.
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But we did have some wonderful views along the way also.
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We saw results of some forest fires.
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We left British Columbia and headed into the Yukon Territory.
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And, we picked up a souvenier.
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We got to the campground about 5:30 and were we ever dirty. But, there’s no sense taking a picture now to show you since we’re only going to get dirtier. Tomorrow, Saturday, we drive through some of the worst construction zones on the road which also have frost heaves. The next section of road is built over permafrost, permanently frozen ground beneath the surface. It isn’t really solid and moves around a lot - thus, building a highway to carry semis, RV’s and cars is a constant task, a new section every summer and then, back to the beginning to build again. To make the worst frost heaves, little flags are put out on the side of the road. Very nice hint to slow down, but those little frost heaves are quicker’n a bugs ear - they can appear right after the guys put out the flags for the last frost heave.
We’ve heard stories of cars and RV’s hitting frost heaves so fast and hard that they tear the transmissions out of cars and rip the tow vehicle right off the RV. Drive slowly and pay attention is the word.

About our dirty Jeep and RV - I can’t see a clean vehicle around us, except for the Jeep and RV on our right. In fact, I’ve seen RV’s and tow vehicles even dirtier than we are. And that’s a stretch.

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