They don't have night here!

     It's five o'clock in the morning and the bright sunshine poking its pretty head through my window has me up and at it.  Yesterday morning it was 45 degrees when we left, about 8 AM.  As we drove into White Horse at about 5 in the afternoon, my car thermometer showed the outside temperature at 80 degrees.  The car air conditioner was running, yet there were still patches of snow remaining in shady places along the highway and we remarked about the ice still remaining in places in the Yukon River.  As we pulled into The Klondike Hotel, I noticed the bull rail, a place where you plug your car's engine block heater in to keep it from freezing on winter nights that can be -40 degrees F.  It seems to be a place of extremes.

     After we settled in our hotel, we took a walk to the grocery store a mile down the street.  We noticed right away that everyone carried cloth bags into the store with them for their groceries.  There are none of those plastic bags handed out...they are outlawed in the Yukon.  Smart people, these Klondikers.  The Yukon makes up five percent of the land area of Canada, bigger than California, and with only 31,000 inhabitants, a quarter of them aboriginal, it is one of the most sparsely populated areas left in the world.  But the land is pristine, as clean and pure as any left on our planet.  Evidently, the people who live here plan to keep it that way.

     My car, my nice new formerly bright blue car!  We followed a water truck through a construction zone yesterday.  It was exchanging dust for mud…and it was doing an excellent job of it.  Crystal Gayle could sing a new song:  Don't it make my blue car, don't it make my blue car, don't it make my blue car brow-own!  There's no sense washing it until we get home.  Here's a picture of it for you. 

     With luck we'll be in Alaska today or tomorrow.  We're excited.