Before I talk about the Dawson City Youth hostel, I just have to share a picture of a find I made at the thrift store last Saturday after the outhouse race! There is a special at the thrift store the first Saturday of the month where you can stuff (and I do mean stuff!) a grocery bag with anything and pay just $5.

My keyboard preferences are set to French-Canadian, which more often than not makes my numeric keypad useless since it converts the period to a comma. Moreover, have you ever tried to do bookkeeping on a laptop keyboard?! A ‘proper’ calculator has been on my list of wants for a long time, but I just couldn’t justify the cost for the use it’d get. What a find!

So, that complete randomness aside (I’m trying to combine posts due to my limited online time), today I went to visit my friend Gé, who lives with her husband in a 20′ school bus. They are on a two-year honeymoon! Their first year was spent getting to Dawson by way of just about all of Canada and Alaska (or so it seems) and now they are off to spend the winter in Costa Rica! They completely outfitted the bus themselves, using whatever materials they could find. The result is a rustic and cozy cottage.

My favourite part of their bus conversion is the mini woodstove! They stow it away when it’s warm and then reinstall it when it gets cold:

The stove is installed safely with a chimney:

the chimney adds an adorable touch of whimsy!

Since they don’t rely on hookups, they favour more rustic parking locations. After spending some time at Bonanza Gold (where we met as colleagues for a brief time), they have moved across the Yukon River to the youth hostel located in West Dawson.

The hostel has to be seen to be understood. From a distance, it looks like a pile of bric-à-braque, but the set up is really very well done. There is no running potable water or electricity, but there are interesting bathhouses, seats with a view, and plenty of opportunities to chop wood. I didn’t get to see the cabins, but I think tenting there would be very nice even if it’s one of the more expensive places to tent near Dawson (Bonanza Gold is the cheapest).

This is the shower! Creek water is pumped into the barrel to the left and used for bathing after…

being heated on this wood stove! (guests chop their own wood!)

Gé loves this system, saying that the water heats up quickly and makes the room very hot and steamy.

The owner has thought of everything to make his guests’ rustic stay more comfortable:

a covered drying area

lockable cubbies for long-term tenters

comfy chairs to

take in the view

Finally these signs caught my attention:

I can cross off numbers 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, and 16!

Off my list now are 18 and 21 (26 would have happened if they operated on normal and not Dawson time; ie. if they were open when the schedule says they should be open!)

Done are 28, 30 (my favourite thing to do in Dawson!), 31, and the bonus!