_      We woke up among the Klondike gold rush-era facades of the Attic, as Freddie’s apartment complex is known among the residents.  Once again it was time for more blueberry pancakes using Charla’s blueberries from Talkeetna!  (Readers might have noticed that by now they’ve been smuggled across a second international border, so we should get around to eating them.)

_      We spent the rainy afternoon getting to know Freddie’s roommates and coworkers, and then ventured back into town for a stop at the local brothel.  The Red Onion was Skagway’s brothel back during the gold rush days of the 1890s (and a post office, telegram station, military barracks, etc., before becoming the museum it is today; hence, the 1940's and 50's pinups on the walls), and the fully-functional bar gives tours of the upstairs where the girls never missed a trick.  Today it costs $5 to get upstairs for 15 minutes, which is the exact same that it cost in 1899.

_      Before departing on the trip we had become accustomed to Burger & Brew at the West Rib Pub in Talkeetna on Friday nights, where you get a burger and a PBR for $6.95.  We were adrift in Skagway without our Friday night staple, until a whispered rumor sent us to Jewell Gardens for Friday night Hippie Hour where the burgers are $5 and the PBRs are $2.  Though an extra nickel changed hands, we were able to keep up the Friday night tradition!

_      After dinner, we started up a new Friday night tradition at the Skagway Brewing Company.  Well, perhaps not a tradition since it won’t happen again, but we all wish it was a tradition.  The BrewCo was offering 75 Cent Mystery Shot night, which we descended upon with Freddie and a couple of his roommates.  In addition to 75 cent shots, the BrewCo also had its signature Spruce Tip Blonde back on tap, a favorite of ours after sampling a brown and an IPA the night before.  After a wild time at the BrewCo (where we were the only table ordering mystery shots and also the only table being wild) we made a quick stop back at the Red Onion.  A lowly brothel by day, the RO turns into a dance club at night, luring in the likes of a bachelorette party all the way from Whitehorse.

       We started day three by packing up wet gear thanks to a Dawson morning rain shower.  Once we got all of our wet gear stowed away for the trip, we got to once again jump on the ferry for our final water crossing of the Yukon River.  The ladies at the Visitor Center directed us to the cheapest gas in town, at an industrial Alberta Fuels cardlock system in a mining part of town.  After figuring out how to use the most obscure cardlock system in the world, we were finally zooming out of town on the Klondike Highway.  We stopped for lunch at Moose Creek, a nice campground though it was lacking the running water that it had advertised.  Without rinsing our dishes we were back on the road again.  We continued on to Carmacks for a gas stop, and much more excitingly, a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Mint Chocolate bar that was hiding in the gas station!  We stopped to enjoy some morsels of chocolate at Little Fox Lake, the scene of a catastrophic forest fire in 1998.  The landscape is still charred and recovering to this day.
     A few miles down the road we arrived at Lake Laberge.  We were on an overlook, not quite a marge, but it was still appropriate to have a reading of Robert Service's “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”  After the dramatic reading, we took a look around to discover we weren’t merely at an overlook, but we had somehow ventured into a Public Use Quarry, complete with three Caterpillar 776Bs with keys in the ignitions!  However tempted we were to rally, we settled with a photo shoot.  (Who knows how good the steering would be on a vehicle whose tires are taller than the trusty Pilot?!)_

_      Our quarry was quite close to Whitehorse, which features the Yukon Brewery (“Beer Worth Freezin' For”).  Unbeknownst to us we had stopped in on International IPA Day, a day we should all be celebrating.  After a bit of sampling we decided on a growler of Discovery Honey Ale and bottles of Ice Fog IPA and Midnight Sun Espresso Stout. 

_                 We started the second day of our trip with pancakes made with fresh blueberries and strawberries that Charla picked with Sarah and Logan on Monday afternoon.  While Charla was busy at the camp stove, Chase re-packed the Pilot so what we needed was easy to reach and what we didn’t need on this trip (like a snowboard and winter gear) was organized and out of the way.

                We drove into Tok for gas and some errands, including phone calls before our service cut out (even though Tok is 80 miles from Canada, there isn’t a lot going on in the space between the small town and the border).  On the way to Tok, we had a nice surprise and saw a lynx!  After ten miles on the Alaska Highway out of Tok, we got on the Taylor Highway to Chicken.  Our journey into Chicken started with a big disappointment, as the “Chicken Community” sign formerly covered in an assortment of stickers from travelers had recently been replaced.  It was brand spanking new, with the Department of Transportation laminate still peeling off on the corners.  Things got better once we got into town, and we got laid in Chicken!  We also picked up free chickens that we had earned and met a couple Romanian motorcyclists who were journeying across North America on their own bikes from home.  We had one last stop at Downtown Chicken for gas, and luckily for us we paid up and were ready to leave just as two busloads of Princess tourists pulled up to Downtown.  The tourists slowly waddled off the bus, cameras in hand, to invade Chicken as we sped out of town.

_                 But we didn’t speed too quickly, as the Taylor Highway ascended up into the mountains and grew increasingly hairy.  Just a short time before we passed, a large RV motorcoach with a car in tow had rolled off the side of the mountain and come to rest approximately 150 feet below the road.  The Troopers had already cordoned off the scene so we didn’t stop to investigate ourselves, but it didn’t look like a rollercoaster ride we’d have wanted to experience.

_                 The Taylor Highway becomes the Top of the World Highway as the road becomes Canadian.  Luckily we were let across the border without too hard a time from the Canadian Border Security Agent on duty (even though we were smuggling some more of Charla’s freshly-picked berries).  We had been foolishly using our time earlier in the day, so we cautiously drove as fast as we dared along the beautiful and treacherous road to Dawson City.  Arriving just in time to jump on the George Black, the free ferry across the Yukon River (because the Yukon territorial government hasn’t yet gotten around to building a bridge) we made it to Diamond Tooth Gertie’s just in time for their first can-can show of the evening.  Gertie’s is Canada’s oldest casino from before casinos were legal in the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, and today in addition to gambling Gertie’s offers shows throughout the evening.  Told by Diamond Tooth Gertie (the actual proprietor in the 1890s, who actually did have diamonds in her teeth at the time) and her dancing girls, the show tells us how she met Phineas and all the hilarity that ensues.  After a dinner between shows at the Triple J Hotel, and the second show at Gertie’s, it was time for one last hop across the ferry to camp in West Dawson.

_ A nice drive east on the Glenn Highway led us through the Chugach Mountains and past Matanuska Glacier.  After taking the left to Canada in Glenallen on the Richardson Highway, the full moon started rising over Mount St. Elias and the mountains exhibited an amazing alpenglow.  Twenty-one miles into the Tok Cut-Off we found a great spot to hunker down for the night with bathrooms and picnic tables and all!