Yukon Ho!

Once we got through the pretty vast (but not the last) construction site, Jim and Rich decided to hang out and check out some local hot springs. I decided to ride on with my new friends Ritchie, Matthew, and Julee from Ohio. Two brothers and a sister taking a ride to Alaska together - how cool is that? My sister and I can barely stand to be in the same room together for more than an hour, and here these three are riding and bunking with each other for nearly a month. That's love, let me tell you.

This picture was taken shortly after all four of us nearly dumped our bikes. There are a lot of loose gravel patches throughout the Al-Can, but almost all of them are well labeled and relatively easy to ride through if you are prepared for them. Well, we were all riding along at about 70 mph when all of a sudden I saw big clouds of dust come up as Matthew crested a hill and hit a monster gravel patch. I soon saw Ritchie and Julee disappear into the dust as I hit my brakes and downshifted to prepare for it. Within a second or two, my visibility was reduced to zero as I hit the gravel, and both my front and rear wheels decided they no longer liked each other and wanted to go in opposite directions. Although the patch couldn't have been more than 100 yards long, it was the most harrowing part of the ride thus far (an opinion shared by the other three as well). I'm really disappointed that the road crews didn't label that gravel, since someone is going to eventually need to be airlifted out of there (or buried) because of it.

After that little sphincter-puckering wake-up call, we headed into Watson Lake and stopped for the night. THAT was fun - we rented rooms in the same hotel, had dinner and drinks together, and then went out to the local hotspot, the bar at the Watson Hotel. We also picked up another rider, Derek, who was riding north from Indiana. At the Watson, we ran the pool table, guaranteeing the enmity of the locals. Some little weasel of a guy tried to pick up Julee (who has a boyfriend back home), and we all thought a fight might be imminent. However, the only ass-kicking came on the pool table, and those poor, drunken bastards are probably still trying to figure out what happened.

One last notable thing: the Watson Hotel had "live entertainment," which meant some guy with a guitar, sequencer, and drum machine doing rock classics. I will never hear "Hotel California" the same way again...