2005/07 Alaska and Back Again - Road to Tok |
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Sunday July 31st
It was still raining in the morning, and the bubbling creek was now much larger, and close to drowning the fire pit. We thought we’d have an easy day doing the 150 miles to Tok, but the road was very bad. There were many “ripples” which had us “porpoising” with the trailer, and even more “breaks” where the ripples had been replaced by gravel with bomb craters.
We also had eight miles of roadworks on the Tok Cutoff with very bad gravel and massive areas of potholes. It was raining for the whole trip so it was difficult to guess at how deep the lakes in the road were. We saw a couple of cars that had run off the road, and I was worried we were going to break something. All the pounding and violent ups and downs had moved everything around at the back end of the trailer and opened all the drawers and cupboards. All the hangers and clothes were in a big heap outside the closet.
In Tok the rain was lighter but it was mixed with smoke from the fires up north. This was really the pits! You are supposed to get either rain or fires, not both at the same time! However, this got us thinking that maybe we should go north to get out of the rain, and we decided to go home via Dawson City rather than go back across the Yukon on the Alaska Highway.
We stayed at the same campround, Tundra RV, to make use of the laundromat and the Internet connection. This time we had one of those German capsule buses just behind us, where the passengers sleep in little coffin-like compartments in the underneath of the bus. Not the way I’d like to travel.
We cooked a barbeque outside in fine rain, not enough to bother putting the awning out. Of course, the rain then got worse and we finished cooking in heavy rain with the barbeque under the picnic table.