Watson Lake

Robert, Monday, September 8

Today marks the end of our fourth month on the road. In truth it hasn’t seemed that long and we are not ready for it to end in another three weeks or so. Anyway, we set out on the road again. This time we were off to Watson Lake. Watson Lake is hardly more than a bump in the road but it is known for its Sign Post Forest. Actually the road from Whitehorse to here is one of the best we have driven in a long time. I drove today and I actually got up to 55 mph for most of the way. There were only a few bumps so the 250 miles we drove today were a breeze. Some days on rough roads, driving half that distance takes the same time and it is exhausting. We saw sighs along the road saying we should watch out for the caribou. It might as well have warned us to look out for Big Foot as we saw neither. We got here and found the campground right in the middle of town open. The town itself looks like the population is about 100 or 200, it is tiny. After we got set up, we walked to the Sign Post Forrest. It occupies an area about the size of a city block and is covered with sign posts. Each post is set in the ground and is about 12 feet tall. Each post is covered with every kind of sign imaginable. Most signs are from someone’s home town. Some are home made, some are the signs you see when entering a town that say something like, “Welcome to Podunk.” After we walked around for a while, we walked to the Northern Lights Centre. There they have a planetarium where they have a northern lights show. The show was long on pretty and short on facts. After the show I asked the person running it how the northern lights caused outages to communications and power grids. His response was, “Well, it is electricity.” It was obvious that this was the depth of his knowledge about the subject. We then walked to Eddie’s Fast Food which was right next door. When we checked into the campground, the woman there said they had good burgers and pizza. We each had a burger and fries and it was OK. Fast it was not. We walked back to the trailer and no sooner had we got inside as it started to pour down rain. After using the slow internet WiFi, we hit the sack.