Whitehorse

Just because we are on "vacation" does not mean we get to ignore some of life's typical little chores, yep, spent our morning at Jiffy Lube! Tom is pretty much a fanatic about car (RV) maintenance, and you know that generally pays off in the long run! Since we left mid June we have traveled about 5,000 miles! Which doesn't sound bad knowing we're have driven all the way to Alaska and are on the way home...

Here is the fun part of the oil change, we got to try our first Tim Horton's coffee/doughnut shop! They are everywhere in Canada, kind of like Dunkin Doughnuts in the US. But a bigger selection of breakfast food, better coffee, and pretty dang tasty "Timbits", aka doughnut holes! So overall I was perfectly happy to wait for the oil change!

Once breakfast was over we headed to a couple of stops we missed the last time we were here. We went up to Yukon Art Center (YAC) to check out the public art gallery. Liked the outdoor sculpture garden best, indoor they had an exhibit of "raven" weaving and some copper masks. Very small number of pieces. But interestingly they had a temporary exhibit of art "created at the canyon". The reason it appealed to us is because when we were here in early July we visited Miles Canyon, and the artists were there "creating". Today we saw the final works exhibited! Particularly odd, had been a group of dancers that had carried living room type furniture out into the woods and created this dance number...it was so funny seeing them there in the woods with furniture... and very hard to imagined what their art statement could be! But today I got to see the final video! That is what i call closure!

From there we headed to the Yukon Transportation museum, and enjoyed some of the historical equipment, quite a few planes (and related stories), cars, trains, and snow "machines". They also have the world's largest weather vane, an actual airplane, I included the picture in my post when we were here in July!

Next stop, the "world's longest fish ladder" to accomodate the migrating fish at Schwatka Lake, which is actually the dam on the Yukon River, including (of course) salmon. We saw this ladder in July and there were no salmon migrating yet. They suggested mid August, so we returned today to see if we could see the salmon....well, we are still a little early. But we did see ONE salmon; which is way better than none! What makes this ladder so interesting to me, is that the salmon migrating up the Yukon will have swam over 2,000 miles from the Bering Sea to get to their final spawning grounds. One of the longest migrations of salmon. Miraculous to think where this single guy came from, and how many fishermen he had eluded!

Back to the Visitor Center to turn in our Yukon Passports, a kind of fun summer program where you get your passport stamped at various museums and cultural centers. When stamped and submitted, you are entered in a drawing to win some Yukon GOLD! Keeping my fingers crossed!

Our last lunch in the Yukon, halibut (again!) with a Yukon Red beer, and then back on the Alaska Highway. The stretch between Whitehorse and Teslin was really a scenic drive, and the roads were a little better. We are actually staying at the Teslin Lake campground, which coincidently is where we stayed heading north! So we "knew" the layout, but were not early enough to get lakeside, dang! However, our site is nice and I can see the lake through the trees. Little afternoon walk with Auggie, some trip planning, and taco salad for dinner!Read more