The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Yukon

Hello everyone! Sorry about the lapse in blog last night, but once I tell you why, I'm sure you'll all understand!
We left Ft. Nelson, British Columbia yesterday morning, enroute Watson Lake, Yukon for the night. Armed with a hotel reservation at the only place in "town" that would allow a dog in the room, we thought we were all set for the night. I even passed on the name of the place to another couple leaving the same hotel in Ft. Nelson since they didn't have reservations yet, and had a lab with them as well.
I couldn't have been more wrong about being set for the night. UGH!!!! Watson Lake could rival some of the places we saw in Western Nebraska in terms of "limited" accomodations and options for dining! The "town" is incredibly small, and, um, well, not that nice. To make it worse, we try to check into our motel (yes, that's right, motel, not hotel...the "hotel snob" that I am noticed that right away!), where the man behind the desk informs us that they don't have our reservation because the hotel changed ownership on June 1st and we had the forethought to book way back in March! He had a room, though, so we figured we'd be ok. And, since "they" had made a mistake (he used the more colorful f-word rather than mistake), they wouldn't charge us the pet fee. GREAT!
Until we saw the room.... let's just say it wasn't what was advertised, what we were supposed to pay $99/night for, or what any decent human being would sleep in. Ok, maybe it wasn't that bad, but it was pretty nasty. It had obviously been a 2-bed room at one point in time, but they were "remodeling" (did I mention the lack of carpet in the hallway, with dirty plywood in its place), so the 2-queen room was a 1-double room, complete with broken night stand and 30 (I think I'm being generous there) year old bathroom fixtures. The grime of decades turned my stomach, and we promptly walked out to go make some phone calls.
Long story short (I'm sure Mom could share the details of my melt down!), we returned the key, got our money back, and headed down the road to a camp site where they had beautiful 4-star cabins! But, where we pitched our tent because the only cabin left was the one they keep hypo-allergenic, thus, no dogs! We set the tent up in record time due to the mosquitos (the provincial "bird" of Yukon) and the impending rain and headed over to their restaurant for a quick meal.
After dinner, we discovered that our aerobed pump was no longer charged enough to blow up the bed... which, it turned out, didn't matter because the bed was no longer whole enough to keep air in it. Two puncture holes meant that we got to sleep on the ground on top of our deflated aerobed with enough blankets to smother lesser people as we tried to keep out the VERY chilly temperatures - remember, we were camping in the YUKON! With sunset at midnight, the sun never really going down, and sunrise around 5 (but I woke up at 3 and it was bright enough for me to read my watch), along with the slowly deflating aerobed, there wasn't much sleep to be had last night! Trying once again not to get eaten alive by the mosquitos, we broke camp this morning, fairly early, and headed up the road to Whitehorse... the capital of the Yukon.
We're now very happily tucked into a king suite at the Best Western, which more than makes up for last nights' debacle! We enjoyed a nice walk along the Yukon River this afternoon with a very happy Fred and are now getting ready to head out for some dinner and a look around town.

Tomorrow we head back into the US, staying at a sled-dog puppy breeding farm (in a cabin to ourselves!) in Tok. So we've seen the good parts of Yukon - more scenery and Whitehorse; the bad - the mosquito-ey camp site; and the UGLY - WATSON LAKE! We survived, and we're looking forward to getting into Alaska tomorrow!

That's it for tonight... no pictures because we haven't made any stops, really. Plus yesterday's post is loading very slowly so we'll give blogger a break.
Love you all!
Becca