20 May 2016: What the what Rosie?!?!?!?
C – I awoke during the night to hear Todd shivering and shaking in his light sleeping bag. He has debated a number of times about whether he should upgrade his bag, and I think last night might have cemented his decision!!! After offering to hurl everything I could find in the tent over him in an effort to warm him up, I drifted back to sleep, completing snug in my warm bag.
The morning was quite chilly and so I hung about in my bag in the tent until about 0830am, when the beautiful sun rays began to warm up our camp. Todd, by this time, had ventured out of the tent to make himself a hot cup of tea, successfully clanging every piece of cooking equipment we own! I must admit I got way too excited when he announced that the water had frozen in our water bottles – so after putting on every piece of my clothing, I inspected the water bottle and checked our thermometer. Wow, it got to -2.5 last night – our coldest night ever camping (although this is definitely not cold for Canadians!).
We set off after making Rosie promise us a million times that she would not get a flat tyre today. We rode the rest of the way over Gnats Pass to Dease Lake. We stopped here to give the girls a drink and I was standing in line to prepay the fuel when a man burst in, urgently told the lady behind the counter to put our fuel on his account and left. I was left standing there with nothing to do but ask the lady behind the counter what just happened!
We left Dease Lake with high spirits, still blown away by the generosity. All was going swimmingly well, it was a beautiful clear day with lovely riding. Then…… Rosie’s front tyre felt weird, like it was starting to swing from side to side. Within about 15 seconds I had pulled up next to Todd, asking him to check the tyre. He thought it looked ok, but the movement got worse and I immediately pulled over to see the rest of the air in the tyre escaping. Yep, Rosie had disgraced herself yet again.
After threatening to leave her in the ditch, we discovered that this time it really wasn’t all her fault. Although I am sure I heard her say something about being jealous of all the attention Mabel was getting during the rain the other day.
We had decided to try our best to reach the junction with the Alaska Highway today and we were happy to make it there at 5.30pm. We stopped in at the junction gas station and when I went in to prepay, the guy behind the counter announced “you don’t need to prepay, you are in the Yukon now”. It's always so exciting to cross a border, even a state border! We picked up a map and found a campsite about 50km up the road.
When we arrived at the camp we were pleasantly surprised that free firewood was supplied! We had a nice quiet evening by the warming fire.
Tomorrow, we are aiming for wifi, laundry and a shower (trust me, we both need it by now!) – here we come Whitehorse!