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Dawson City, stories about gold diggers, fortunes made and lost, Klondike the Eldorado si today more a tourist trap than anything else but it's still a name with a certain amount of mystique.
In the Downtown Hotel they have the Sourdough saloon with swinging doors and all, they also have custom where they they serve the "toe".
According to custom somebody found a desiccated toe in some gold diggers hut and brought it back to town and somebody got the idea of separaitng the calves from the bulls by putting the toe in a glass of whisky and drink the whisky without swallowing the toe.
One guy swallowed the toe and took off like a bat outta hell.
Now there's a 2500 dollar fine to be paid if you swallow the toe, ah yes the swallowed toe left them withouy one but they got some donated from various amputations.
My travelling mate John told me about it but would not do it, Yankee wimp!
I of course had to do it so I paid 5 bucks for a shot and went up to the table where the "toe captain" sat, John paid the 5 buck
"toe tax and I got a certificate to prove that I'm a sucker, a sucker in a long line of suckers, there are about 72000 people who have done and at 10 bucks a pop thats a lot of money for a toe.
Anyway the captain shows a very brown very dry piece that is supposed to be a toe, she puts in your glass and , just whacko just drink up and the toe must touch your lips.
One toe was stolen and they used a spare one, they got it sent back from a repentant sinner, I was there when a lady came with it, I've seen history being made, live!
The next item on the agenda was the Cassiar highway, just around the corner, a mere 1000 km away so the next morning we took off for Teslin, a very small place in the middle of nowhere but they did have a motel, and a surprisingly nice room at that.
One thing when you're up in the sticks you are at the mercy of the inn keepers, just smile and pay, it ain't cheap. Lo and behold it didn't rain all day and
we saw some bears.
All in all good riding, the roads have a very coarse surface so tyre wear is impressive, and there are gravel sections where you have to ride with care and it's also very dusty.
The next morning we went to the Cassiar highway junction and soon enough it started to rain, we stopped for the night in Dease lake and I must confess that I was not overwhelmed by the fabled highway, the first 50 km of so there was no forest, just the remains of a big mama of a forest fire, not a pretty sight.
The motel in Dease lake was nice but the possibilities of getting food rather dismal, one delicatessen cum grocery store, and the delicatessen was closed, a 5 pm!
The next was a Chinese "restaurant located in a caravan without whells and the only had five item on the menu and no tables.
Number three was "The burger Shack" a small hut that did burgers with a long queue, so we went to the grocery store and bought some food and had pasta with Bolognese sauce and toast and a six pack of beers, enough
for both breakfast and dinner.
Lots of bikes there and almost everyone but us were going north, telling tales of woe about the 8 hour heavy down pour they'd had riding up to Dease Lake.
Believe it or, not the next morning it was pissing down so on with the rain gear and just go.
For some strange reason or other it stopped after a while and the ride along the Cassiar turned out to be very nice, we stopped by a lake for a brief pause but the mozzies were
absolutely rabid for some breakfast blood so the pause was very short.
600 km later or so, saw us in Smithers in the Alpen Inn, the staff left somewhat to be desired regarding service, a snail would be like Usain Bolt compared to the girls who worked there.
We intended to go to Williams lake but got lured by the prospect of some old mining town from the gold rush in British Columbia so we stopped in Quesnel.
Barkerville was the place and were told that people spent two days there, after 3 hours we were done, a little bit of history
albeit not very old, and a monument to the madness that gold can induce in man.
After Barkerville we took a dirtroad that was about 160 km and that would get us to Williams lake, the first part of the road they had passed with a grader and i REALLY hate newly grade roads, you never know where the soft spots are, going along a a fair, for me, clip and suddenly it gets soft under foot, and the bike gets a mind of it's own.
But when we'd passed the grader it was great fun, very dusty but fun.
Beautiful landscape and suddenly John was gone so I did what you do, I waited for as while and turned back and was going quite slowly and suddenly 3 black bears on the road, but when I finally managed to get my camera out of my pocket and turn of the engine there was only one, trotting away at a fair clip and he was gone.
I was only about 15 m away when I saw the first two, a very nice experience.
And by the way the bear does not only shit in the
woods the bears also shit on the road, there were bear turds every other meter so the bears were out the but very unwilling to show them selves, to much noise from two motorbikes.
It would be nice to do that road in an electric car.
Tons of dust later we ended up in Williams lake, a bit to much gravel for my taste and we saw no one for about three hours, fancy walking back with the woods filled with bears.
Good dinner in Mike's steakhouse and a very pretty waitress ;-).
My chain had had it and John needed a new rear tyre so we tried to find that in in town the next morning, no such luck.
It's a lot of riding, many km every day so it wears things out.
We had t go to Kamloops for that and fortunately a very friendly shop in Williams lake and prepared them for the tall guy with the orange bike, one shop had the parts and the other one the techs to do it.
Of course something got intercoursed up.
Wrong rear sprocket and I saw myself hanging around Kamloops
for week waiting for parts, it so turned out that there was a fellow KTM 990 owner in town that they knew about and he had a new rear sprocket that he would sell me, he even brought me the sprocket and after a long chat about KTMs and adventures and so on and so forth he wouldn't accept my money! Another guy turned up and I told tales about my South American little trip.
It was really nice, not for the money but for the friendliness and the willingness to help out.
All in all a show of nice Canadians.
So after thanking him profusely we found a motel and had dinner.
Kamloops to Belling ham was a nice trip bar, parts of it were so beautiful that it hurt my eyes but going through down town Vancouver was no fun, lots of traffic and lots of traffic lights, it seemed to go on forever and the 40 mins wait at the border, well 2 beers and a Mexican dinner cured me alright.
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