{"id":137,"date":"2013-03-24T12:40:35","date_gmt":"2013-03-24T12:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/whiskeypapa\/here\/?page_id=137"},"modified":"2013-03-24T13:17:47","modified_gmt":"2013-03-24T13:17:47","slug":"day-six-up-in-flames-whitehorse-tok","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/day-six-up-in-flames-whitehorse-tok\/","title":{"rendered":"Day Six – Up in Flames (Whitehorse – Tok)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>The absolute coldest day to date when we left Whitehorse it was 3 degrees celsius.\u00a0 I’ve already done the conversion for you – 37.\u00a0 At this temperature the electric clothes aren’t an option – they are mandatory.\u00a0 I figured I could get by without the pants since I had the rain pants to cut the wind.\u00a0 Not so much.\u00a0 I already knew from yesterday when it got fairly clod, that I was going to have to do something else.\u00a0 What I did was put a folded up hand towel in front of each knee (because that is where it gets the coldest) and held them there with rubber bands; and, that was enough to keep my knees from freezing.\u00a0 The electric socks, jacket liner, and gloves took care of the rest.\u00a0 I wouldn’t call it a comfortable experience but it wasn’t bad.<\/p>\n

Although we did see our first moose, the wildlife on the road today wasn’t nearly as plentiful as yesterday.\u00a0 What was plentiful on this leg of the trip was the frost heaves.\u00a0 They are places where the frost has moved the road around and they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.\u00a0 We’ve been warned though and I thought we could just slow down and minimize the damage.\u00a0 While that sounds good in theory, it doesn’t work in application.\u00a0 Most of the worst sections are marked with orange cones or little flags on the side of the road, some of them aren’t marked at all.\u00a0 If you don’t slow down to less than 50 mph, you are going to be coming off the seat of your bike and anything over 65, you are going to be either bottoming out your shocks or launching your bike into the sky – or both.\u00a0 I would have been happy to add a kidney belt to all my clothes.\u00a0 Really rough road, especially for the last 140 miles of Canada.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Less than two miles inside the Alaska border, I’m smelling gas.\u00a0 That is not good especially since we stopped for gas over 20 miles ago.\u00a0 I reach down under the tank to the high pressure line that feeds my fuel injectors & SHIT my glove is wet.\u00a0 I’ve done this dance before and know that I’m going to be looking at a cut fuel line – cut by the bracket for the air horns that I just HAD to have – even after they cut the line once before.\u00a0 SHIT – did I already say that?\u00a0 Hmmm – I’ve been checking where the wear spot was last time and it didn’t seem to be wearing so I was surprised that it wore a hole in the line – but we were doing all that crash bang riding.\u00a0 I got the horn & bracket off and it was the high pressure line, just in a different spot.\u00a0 This time the nut and bolt that attach the bracket to the bike is what wore the hole.\u00a0 Last time this fuel line thing happened I tried to fix it for about an hour and a half then called a tow truck.\u00a0 Today, that’s not really an option since we are just inside the US border and 100 miles from the closest town.\u00a0 So – armed with the knowledge from my previous experience and some input from my riding buddies I patched it up where it wasn’t leaking, at least not just sitting there.\u00a0 I said, if this thing catches fire I’m just going to let it burn to the ground.\u00a0 Then Rich said, “Well, at least the license plate is appropriate”.<\/p>\n

Fairbanks is still about 200 miles away when we pull over in Tok for gas.\u00a0 I’m done though and tell the boys that even though my wife spent 45 minutes trying to find us a place to stay in Fairbanks (thank you dear) we are going to be spending the night here.\u00a0 Turns out, they were more than happy to get off & call it a day.\u00a0 We are staying in the Westmark Hotel – which we later found out is actually owned by Holland America.\u00a0 This is where all the tour buses that are taking people on their Alaska cruise and drive adventures come to feed and overnight their passengers.<\/p>\n

After we check in, John takes a smoke break and thinks it’s ironic that Tok is pronounced “toke”.<\/p>\n

It’s clown week here in Tok; at least it’s clown week here at the hotel – we haven’t seen much evidence of it anywhere else.\u00a0 When we got here there were a couple people wearing fuzzy purple hair or something like that but there are also Happy Birthday signs around so I thought it was just part of the birthday celebration.\u00a0 Then we saw a flyer that said this was clown week.\u00a0 They probably thought we were coming to apply for a position in all our bright orange and yellow rain gear – we looked a little like clowns.\u00a0 We were walking over to the restaurant here at the hotel for some dinner & drinks and noticed a kid walking around with one of those head umbrellas on and he had all kinds of “stuff” attached to it; other than that he was dressed normally.\u00a0 Rich said, “there’s another clown.”\u00a0 John said, “No, I think he’s just Canadian.”<\/p>\n

We really enjoyed dinner and the conversations we started with other people at the bar.\u00a0 Rich asked one of the guys that came up and ordered a beer, which part of New York he was from – the guy got his hackles up a little and said he was from Boston.\u00a0 Rich said that at least he got the right side of the Mississippi to which the guy replyed, “Yea, but you got the wrong baseball team.”\u00a0\u00a0 We had a few laughs with that guy, bought him a beer then sent him off to tend to his wife, who wasn’t feeling well.\u00a0 Next guy was from Wisconsin as I recall, him and his wife.\u00a0 Rich did most of the talking but we were all engaged in the conversation.\u00a0 Jokes were exchanged, everyone had big laughs and a great time.\u00a0 The bar tender was the worst I’ve ever seen.\u00a0 I’ll spare you the details but for a $150 bar\/dinner tab – her tip was 5 cents.\u00a0 Rich paid the bill and asked me to please not leave a nickel on the bar so I didn’t.\u00a0 I went back afterward and left it.\u00a0 She was standing right there – but had her back to me & I’m sure she didn’t even notice.\u00a0 Hopefully she got the message – I know I felt better.\u00a0 And it won’t spoil the good time we had – we’ll just remember the good stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The absolute coldest day to date when we left Whitehorse it was 3 degrees celsius.\u00a0 I’ve already done the conversion for you – 37.\u00a0 At this temperature the electric clothes aren’t an option – they are mandatory.\u00a0 I figured I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-137","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7tL53-2d","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203,"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/137\/revisions\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennysride.com\/deadhorse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}