Travels With Miranda

This should be our last ‘busy’ weekend of the season. It’s a long weekend called ‘Discovery Days’ to honour the 1896 discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek, without which there would have been no gold rush and no Dawson as we know and love it today.

The motel was fully booked for the whole weekend, so last night I ‘hung out’ at the office until most of the stragglers had come in. Normally, I would put keys in the door of the reserved rooms and put a list on a white board of who goes where. But when we are booked solid we are concerned about people ‘stealing’ rooms, so if at all possible, someone hangs out in the office until pretty late. Since I work the evening shift and start at a civilized hour, I was happy to stay late yesterday, finishing at 12:15AM, and then coming in an hour later than scheduled this morning (noon!).

Normally, the office ‘closes’ at 8, at which time I cash out and do the night audit, while remaining available for late checkins and people needing change, and then I lock up at 9. Yesterday, there was a steady stream of people and phone calls until 11:45. I cashed out at midnight, once a lull set in. I couldn’t imagine staying that late at the office if it wasn’t busy, but the time flew by yesterday!

Tonight was much less manic and I got out at 9:30 since most of the people who booked in yesterday are staying the full weekend. I can’t even begin to count the number of calls I got enquiring about room availability. We’re full, town is full, and the Klondike Lodge 40km down the highway is also full. The nearest available rooms are in Tok or Whitehorse! We are doing steady business of people sleeping in their car or in a tent!

The season will start to wind down on Monday. Sometime early next week, I need to move to a site closer to the office because I will be taking the emergency phone home next weekend overnight and the signal doesn’t reach my present site. I would have had to move in a couple of weeks anyway as we will start to shut down sites and mine was on the list.

June passed so slowly, but the rest of the summer has flown by and I am shocked by how much I didn’t do that I had planned on doing! Hopefully, I can squeeze in one more mini road trip before I begin the long journey south to my winter home.

Crazy as these weekends can be, they are fun, too, and time goes by very quickly!

Here is another picture taken a midnight last night/this morning. It’s obvious that the sun is low to the horizon and there are even hints of ‘sunset colours’, but it’s still daylight out!

I’ve decided that since I don’t start work until 9:30, I’m not going to get up before 9 and my bedtime is going to be midnight to one AM so that I’m at least working with my natural night owl circadian clock and not fighting two enemies at once.

After two full work days at Bonanza Gold, I decided that three weeks of work here wasn’t going to do it for me. So, I had a chat with the manager and I’m now here for three months. This meant that a 15A non-sewer site was no longer going to work for me and I moved to a much nicer FHU site with less traffic. Moving tends to suck, but in such circumstances, it’s a Good Thing. I now have trees, shade, a place to park the car next to the rig, and I don’t have to go dump every week meaning that I can really hunker down for the season.

So, I’m spending the whoooooooole summer in Dawson City!!! I’m taking two and a half or so weeks off in July to do the Chilkoot, of course! I’ll leave the rig here where I have a million cat sitters available to me and go to Whitehorse and back by car.

I don’t think I’ve said this in a while so:

I LOVE THIS LIFE!!!!