Diamnond Tooth Girdy's, the local casino and floor show in Dawson, is the night time entertainment feature of the city. For gambling there's slots, black jack, roulette, and Texas Hold'em.
Every couple hours the floor show starts with the Madam of the parlour, Diamond Tooth Girdy, singing and featuring her dancing girls. There's a bit of audience participation, but for me the real fun was at the poker table.
We left around 11pm and took the ferry back across the Yukon to setup camp. The ferry is operated by the city 24 hours a day.
Even at 11:30pm, the campground was still noisy in some places, but it was big enough to find a quiet spot.
The next morning I packed up my bike and took the ferry back into Dawson where I explored all the buzz around the day's festivities. The ferry workers were giving out Canadian flags and this one in particular thought it would be really cool if I put one on my bike. I wasn't allowed to get off my bike on the ferry, so I just stuck it in my cup. It was paper and would probably tear if I put it in the wind anyway.
In the city, there was a gold mining competition area that was getting setup and small wooden barricades, which you could easily get around, blocking off the parade route. Front street got busier and busier as locals and tourists gathered to stake their claim on the best spot to view the parade.
Both bikes needed fuel, so we stopped at the only gas station in Dawson City, a Shell station. Bronze (87 octane) was $1.39/liter and Gold (89 octane) was $1.46/liter. That's over $5/gallon!
We decided to stick around and parked the bikes where we could easily get out of the city in case it was going to drag on. That wasn't really a concern though because the parade was pretty small.
First out were a bunch of mounties marching in front of a police car. The sirens were blarring as they passed by. Next was a very large group of kids riding their bikes and tricycles down the parade route. The rest of parade featured some old fashioned cars, fire trucks with Girdy's girls, and the rest of the DAwsone fire equipment. It was over pretty quick.
The agenda for today was to meet up with Steve near Whitehorse, a 330 mile trip. We were to meet at some campground which has hot springs at the end of the day. This section of road was pretty good asphalt, but would break off into gravel sections usually no bigger than 1/4 mile. Some of the gravel was thick though which slowed us down. We also hit areas of heavy rain. I think the combination made the 330 miles feel like a bit more by the time we were done.
We rode by a place called Five Finger Rapids and it looked pretty spectacular. I didn't have my camera ready so I missed the shot. After that was Fox Lake, which also looked like a nice recreation area.
The hot springs campground turned out to be a good find although the prices are a little high for tent camping. ($16 + $6.50 for each additional tent) Steve was already there and had a spot paid for. I setup on the same site, but Paul left to go find some free camping somewhere else. There's two things Paul likes in a camp site, 1) Free, 2) seclusion, both of which this place was not. I like those too, but will not always go out of my way to find it when only staying one night.
I needed a shower badly, so I paid $8.40 to go in the hot springs. They require you to shower before you go in so it worked out great.
After that Steve and I went to the restaurant and caught up on the events of the past few days. He took a side trip down to Skagway, which apparently has a lot of history connected with Dawson as they are connected by water ways and the Yukon River.
Later when I got back to camp, a couple motorcycles pulled into the park and pulled into a site next to us. One was a 1150 GS and the other was a Triumph Tiger that was setup like no other I've seen, except for one in Coldfoot that was owned by the guy I met from Lake Elsinore. Keep in mind we're over 700 miles away from the last place I saw this guy and this campground is about 7 miles off the main road. These two guys are old high school buddies, but one lives in Washington now.
I re-introduced myself with a mention of Coldfoot and they quickly remembered "Oh the Goldwing ... you're famous now". Apparently they thought it was pretty funny in Coldfoot, when after they asked me how I picked my bike up off the Dalton mud, I replied "Oh, I've picked that thing up plenty of times". It's true, just not under the same circumstances. Steve and I exchanged info with them so we can go riding a little closer to home.
Tomorrow we're stopping by the Honda shop in Whitehorse so Paul can hopefully get new brake pads. He is grinding metal to metal now and even dragging his feet to help stop the bike at slow speeds. I started calling him Fred Flinstone.
We'll ride the rest of the Alaskan Highway into Dawson Creek (different than Dawson City), and then south into Jasper.
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