Tuesday 8/28
We are up at the ungodly hour of 9:00 AM. It’s been a rough night for Nancy, who claims that I’ve been snoring like Darth Vader. Being an empirical kind of guy, I have serious doubts about this snoring thing—I’ve never heard it.
We spend the day in Whitehorse, which is the capital of and the biggest city in the Yukon. Only about 30,000 people live in the whole of the Yukon (which is about 20% larger than California) and 2/3rds of them live in Whitehorse. The name is the stuff of legends evoking thoughts of pioneers, wilderness, gold rush, saloons, gunfights, chronicled by the likes of Robert Service and Jack London. That was yesteryear, today the city is pleasant, but way to urban for our tastes.
We have several shopping chores on the “to do” list, and all the major retailers have outlets in Whitehorse so this is the place to get stuff done. In the pre-retirement days I had a perpetual “to do” list with over 2,000 entries. Seriously. Some of these were innocuous like, “update airline schedules” or “wash the car”, but many were as ambitious as “reinvent calculus”. The relevance of a few of these has survived, but mostly they’ve dissolved into some undone “to do” ether, never to be meaningful again. It’s a very cosmic thought—kind of like the “tree falling in the forest” conundrum. Probing the deeper meaning of this has been added to my new “to do” list, but frankly it’s not very urgent.
In our retail sortie, Nancy gets her first real exposure to Canadian Tire. They have a HUGE store here in Whitehorse. For those of you who don’t know, this company was originally kind of like our Western Auto stores. For those of you who don’t know about Western Auto, go to Google—you’ll learn that for almost 50 years, they were a key retail factor in rural America. Over the years Canadian Tire evolved into Canada’s largest general merchandise retailer. They sell pretty much everything, including tires. What we found particularly interesting in this outlet was their selection of hockey equipment. Duh, “hockey equipment” in Canada? Well sure, perfectly reasonable to find hockey equipment in Canada, but this selection is magnitudes bigger than the biggest single-sport equipment display we’ve ever seen…probably 150 different hockey sticks, and even more remarkably, dozens of choices of hockey-stick tape…but I digress.
In addition to shopping, we also spend time walking along the Yukon River, and we stop at the Info Center. It’s a big one and very upscale…”Would you like a double mocha latte with that ice-fishing brochure?” Info Centers are a way of life up here, and we’re thinking they’re a missing ingredient in the good ole’ lower 48. Life in Keokuk would be a lot richer with an Info Center. It would also be great if all our towns had a “biggest” attraction like the towns up here do. We’ve seen the “Biggest: Fly Rod, Gold Pan, Cross Country Skis, and Mosquito” up here. Why not, “Visit Keokuk And See The World’s Largest Ear Of Feed Corn!” No telling how many tourists would flock to see that.
We leave Whitehorse and continue our southeastern journey. We pass White Mountain, which has a western-facing, sheer rock face that’s beautifully lit by the afternoon sun. Our son-in-law would love to climb this puppy. We decide to camp at Squanga Lake Provincial Park. We decide that “squanga” is probably a Native American word for something that oozes. Surprisingly we learn that “squanga” has actually made it into the lexicon of today’s teenagers—it’s synonymous with “sweet” or “awesome”. We’re camped near the lake’s shore…it’s a beautiful spot…totally squanga.
