Monday, May 28, 2012

May 27 – To Watson Lake, Yukon


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Another cloudy morning that turned into a bright sunny day. It was only a 200 km drive but we wanted to stop here for a least a while and we are in no hurry.

Lots more long distance views but we are out of the tall mountains.

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We saw out first other large RV on the road. I was talking to the driver in the hot spring. He is an audiologist from the southern states that goes up to a clinic in Fairbanks each summer.  He wanted to stop but they were so desperate to keep him that they offered to pay all his travel expenses. Sweet deal.

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We saw some more bison by the road and also managed to cross one more large animal off our list.

We saw 3 separate ones foraging right by the roadside. We would just pull over to the shoulder and creep by them, snapping a lot of pictures. They mostly ignored us but would occasionally give us the eye.

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Our campground in Watson Lake is nothing special but we have full hookups again to reset. None of the campgrounds here are much more than parking lots.

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One thing we wanted to see here is the signpost forest. A soldier, building the highway, put up a sign about where he was from. The tradition has continued by everyone passing through and by the count at the info center there are now more than 76,000 signs.

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I spent a long time just wandering around.

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Here is one for my mom’s side of the family.

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There were a lot of big official signs from Germany. It can’t imagine how they carried them over.

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There were lots of street signs, license plates and very handmade signs but some of the personal ones were very professional.

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I don’t know why I didn’t think to make one for ourselves. The ones I saw where people just wrote on a board seemed to have faded very quickly. Since we will be back this way on the way home, I have some time to do a proper job.

We saw this old bus conversion from Ontario parked at the forest. I would hesitate to take something that old up this far up here.

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Tonight we went over to a place called the Northern Lights Center. It is a domed theater showing a movie about the aurora. The movie itself was good but the projector they had just wasn’t up to displaying it on such a big screen. It seemed a bit fuzzy. I guess it’s too much to ask for an IMAX projector in a small town.

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