July 30, 2010

Awoke to a beautiful sunny and fairly warm day in Skagway. Paul spent most of the morning working on yet another mechanical problem with the truck and camper. This time the trailer brakes weren’t working. We have truck brakes, but not trailer brakes! Yikes, he’s not sure what’s going on, and we (the girls and I) left him alone while we shopped Skagway. I think we should be shopping for a new camper!!!!

Skagway is a very quaint town. Reminds me alot of Dawson City. A gold mining town that has the oldtime feel. They wooden store fronts, wooden sidewalks, and saloons. Very cute, but extremely busy. Apparently there are at least 5-6 cruise ships a day that stop here for the day, so the town is filled with tourists. A lot of the stores are very expensive jewelry stores.

We booked a 3 hour train ride on the Klondike Gold Rush train on the scenic White Pass and Yukon Route railway. We went from downtown Skagway, which is at sea level to White Pass Summit which is at an elevation of 2,865 ft. All along the trip up they told the story of how the railway came to be and the story of the gold rushers journey up the mountain and of the gangster “Soapy” Smith who was a Skagway resident and the hero who shot him dead, Frank Reid. There was awesome scenery, waterfalls, granite rocks, wildflowers, tunnels, bridges, and the cemetery where the “Soapy” and Frank were put to rest after their infamous shootout. We all really enjoyed this.

After the railroad trip we set out of Skagway, heading north on the Klondike. Paul thought we should probably fill up before we left town, the problem was we couldn’t find a gas station. Surely there had to be gas here. After scoping out most of the town, we finally inquired, only to find there was only one gas station in the whole town, for that matter for quite some ways out of town too, and that gas station only had 2 pumps!! The diesel wasn’t too overly priced though.

Once again we had to cross the border, back into Alaska and we headed for Carcross, which was about 70 miles. Scenery was beautiful along the way, but when we got there , the campground was nothing but a parking lot, with not one camper in it. We decided to move on. We ended up in Tagish. Not really much here either, in fact at this campground we are also the only ones, but how cute it is here. Actually has trees and grass. It isn’t a full hook-up, just electric. I told Paul that basically tonite he could classify this my “dry” camping experience, since there is no internet service!! The owner is a nice woman from Germany. She told me her whole life story and how she ended up here, very pleasant! It was a beautiful evening and we cooked out, some of Paul’s halibut, and it was warm enough out to eat outside, closet thing to camping we’ve had in a while!! I guess one could say today was our first day of heading home.