We ended up spending a full week in Whitehorse, Yukon, because it was so darn pleasant. Whitehorse is a neat little city with lots to see and do, and, thank goodness, not many mosquitoes. After a week of campgrounds with mosquitoes that made you want to cry, it was so nice to be able to hang out outside without being eaten alive. Also, the weather was a lot warmer and drier than we had seen for weeks. Not to mention, by staying a full week we could attend the Canada Day celebrations on July 1, and then bop down to Skagway AK for the Fourth of July; two national holidays in one week!
Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, has a population around 25,000 and is home to about 70% of Yukon’s total population. It is an oasis of middle class suburban living in the middle of a vast wilderness. There’s a Starbucks, bookstore, sushi restaurants, used bookstore, big box grocery store, yoga classes in the park, paved jogging path along the river, big modern library, and playgrounds with shiny new equipment. Meanwhile, it is mostly empty wilderness for hundreds of mile around in every direction. A bald eagle swooped over me on a short hike from our campsite, and we have seen beavers in the Yukon River in town.
So what you’re saying is that it’s nicer than Tucson. 🙂
There was one time several years ago that I thought about using some points on United (Air Canada partner) to fly to Whitehorse, do some hiking in Kluane, and drive out for the Dawson City Music Festival. I don’t know how practical a plan that was, but I wanted to try it. United put a stop to that foolishness by offering an award ticket itinerary that was not as simple and logical as fly to YVR for a connection to Whitehorse. I seem to recall that even the routing to YVR was not as simple as it should have been, but from YVR, if I wanted an award ticket, I would have to endure a routing through Inuvik, NT, before I’d finally get to YXY, and it would have taken almost three days to get there with all the flights. Enjoy your week! (Hmmm, you know, the Dawson City Music Festival is coming up in a couple weeks…. You’re already within an eight hours’ drive.)
Oh, yeah, beware those cross-border fireworks excursions. On one trip to BC, I was returning from Vancouver Island (and this indirectly relates to your gas price entry the other day), on that trip, Victoria (actually Sidney or whatever the town on the peninsula where the ferry terminal is located) to Tsawwassen, rather than back on the Nanaimo-Horseshoe Bay ferry I’d used to get there. Since I was going to be so close to the Washington border, I thought I’d go across and fill up with US-priced gas in Point Roberts (this was way back when border crossings were relatively hassle-free so this wasn’t necessarily a stupid idea). And, yes, I thought it would be cool to be able to say that I had been in this little oddity of US-Canada history. I got to a point on the road leading up to the crossing booth (and at the time, there wasn’t a lot more than that; the satellite view on googlemaps shows that the border crossing operation is a lot more built up now) where there was no practical opportunity to turn around when I saw the huge lineup to cross. For the time I was in Victoria, it did not occur to me that the day I was leaving was 4-July or that BC subUrbanites would be heading into Point Roberts to look at fireworks. So there I was, inadvertently back in the States on USID. (Incidentally, the gas wasn’t really much cheaper than it was in Vancouver anyway, and I would have been better off filling up before I left Victoria, where it was cheaper than on the Lower Mainland. Like you, I noted the prices in Victoria, and figured I could get it cheaper farther along the “road,” only to end up paying more. 😉
And Point Roberts? Compared to Vancouver suburbs, that tiny part of the US looked almost like the Third World in comparison.