Sat 14th - Back at Whitehorse

I missed telling you about our border crossing in yesterday's email.

We drove past the US customs and see all these signs 'Leaving Alaska"; 'Welcome to Yukon' etc. etc, but no Canada customs buildings. We (at least "I") panicked for a minute thinking we must have 'missed' something and maybe the 2 customs were housed together. We nervously kept looking over our shoulders for the sirens and flashing lights and wondering if we'd 'run the border'. Finally we came to a sign saying Can. customs - 27 km !?? We've never seen the 2 ports so far apart !! Weird!

Anyway, it was a smooth crossing with another friendly agent, although we noticed the motorhome that had passed us just before we arrived was pulled over in to one of the bays for the big search. Too bad for him! That's our biggest dread. Not that we have something to hide, but we have SO much stuff packed into every compartment and would hate to have it all pulled out and mucked through!!

We had another bad stretch of highway today. There are the continuous frost heaves -- like a roller coaster. We started out averaging 70 kph, but quickly slowed to 50 & 60 kmp. One begins to look forward to the gravel stretches because the frost heaves can and have been levelled out there. The gravel roads are better than the paved in most cases. You start to hate when you come to the areas where there is nothing but the stunted, scraggly black spruce. Not only are they ugly, but they are the only tree that will survive on poorly drained areas or permafrost. I read where some of those trees with their 2" diameter trunk could be 100 years old !! Anyway, you know with black spruce and permafrost you'll have the frost heaves on the road.

Whitehorse will be our stopping point for tonight. This last 180 km was a much improved road and we made better time than our a.m stretch. With the light rain & gravel roads we'll be looking for a car wash. It looks like the mud on our truck and 5th wheel will need to be chiselled off!! We will also need to change our clocks as we didn't do that yesterday! Oh yes, we saw a couple of brown/grizzly bears along the ditch today.