Just to let you all know we drove this route from Dawson City to Delta Junction, with a overnight in Chicken, Canada is 100% Gravel but starts out Blacktop then a real good Gravel road, finally you arrive at Poker Creek, USA Border services. From there in Alaska you get 11 miles of freshly laid Blacktop then rotten Gravel and not as nice as the Canadian Side, finally arriving in Chicken where we got a place to park?dry camp at a high price of $24, if you wanted full hook up it cost double that price. But from what the gals told me the fudge they sell at the Gold Panner is almost the best they had in most places along the way. They also say the Fudge in Skagway is par with Chicken. On our first day we only saw one Moose who was doing a funny dance to get away from us so we only got a funny looking picture of it, by the way it was a american Moose. We woke up and decided to go to downtown Chicken, first the Gift Store, then the Liquor Store, finally the Pie and Coffee Shop, Oh Boy they have the best Pie one can get way out in the boonies, far from any place like a city. The Gift shop at both places the Gold Panner and downtown Chicken both had a good assortment for everyone to find something. But poor me cannot have Sugar like they put in Fudge but I did have a piece of Apple/Cranberry Pie and oooooooh it was good. While there a mom brought her baby moose around for us to all view and there were at least 75 people there viewing the scene as the Tour bus got to the pies before the rest of us overnight locals who took their time in waking up. But the morning was worth the pictures of mom and baby.
Anyway we finally got into Delta Junction where we shopped for some much needed Groceries and we bought a big heavy cooked Chicken for $8.99 and let me tell you we ate and ate that chicken for 4 nights and 4 lunches between 3 of us, I and neither has the other 2 travelers with me seen a cooked chicken that big. So we parked about 35KM's north of there where we found the 2nd pull out so we parked and had our chicken dinner, went up to start the truck to warm the MH up as we were low on
Propane and it would not start, sounded like a Starter/battery problem, we tried jumping the batteries from the attached car to no avail. We had to wait until Sunday to call Good Sam before we could get help so this was done after a good nights sleep, the Mechanic from Peterbuilt arrived and he got us started by jumping the Starter, he thought it was not the starter or
Battery that we had a dead short on board, Well I can say the drive over that Hwy did not help the problems we were experiencing.
Turns out that drive cost us a few bucks but it was going to cost somewhere else down the road if not there and we got fixed up in 2 days, we had to replace 2 house batteries and 1 start
battery, replace all the bad ends on the wiring, and clean up
electrical problems underneath which I think the Calcium put down on the hwy's in the winter months did not help any. What it does is attack all wiring, batteries etc. but as we bought this unit 2nd hand and got it for a decent price we knew we were going to have do some major work to it. Funny thing is we traveled around 34 days before we started seeing any problems. When we got started we drove to the Peterbuilt Diesel Garage and spent the night next door in the Church Parking lot. Oh boy Ron showed up first thing in the AM and it was Freezing outside and it traveled into the MH real Quick, the gals went inside and I stayed and assisted the Mechanic. Like I said replace the ends on the wiring, but first had to disconnect the
Solar system then Ron removed all 3 batteries but could only get the start
battery in today and the other 2 showed up next day and were installed today AM by Rob the call out guy. Let me tell you I and my two gals have never met so many happy people who love their jobs working for Peterbuilt and it was nice for us to see this and we were treated by all with 100% courtesy and Service by all we dealt with and that includes the Good Sam Gal on the other end of the phone where ever she is.
Satruday we head for Denali and then Anchorage and on and on and on.
Stude