14 August 2018. Inuvik, NWT, Dempster Day 4
Today was one of those rare days where we knew we were going to be sleeping that evening in the same place where we woke up. Two consecutive nights in the same campground!
We decided to give the truck a rest and do some walking around town. The weather was cloudy, and we experienced only light showers through the day. We set out on a quest for an Inuvik t-shirt. We soon learned that the opening of the road to Tuktoyaktuk has created a busy summer for the local shops. If Chuck wanted a women’s sized small, or a mens 3X, he was in luck, otherwise they were very low on stock and wouldn’t be getting any more in for the season. This became our major quest for the day! We found a hoodie that was pretty neat, and planned on going back to the store the next day to pick it up.
We stopped by the library to use the only public wifi in town. They gave you a password that gave you two hours of internet use. And that’s about how long it took us to download five pictures of our mail that had been texted to us by Barb. Yeah, great free connectivity, but no bandwidth.
We also stopped by the local hardware store that was VERY well stocked. We bought a scrub brush for cleaning mud, and a roll of masking tape to seal up the exterior compartment doors for the drive back to pavement. Due to small repairs and such that have occurred over the course of the trip, we’ve visited the hardware stores in several small towns across Alaska and northern Canada. We have found them to be about the best stores in town. The are usually a little cramped, but there’s lots of aisles and they’re packed full of items. This is especially a contrast to the grocery stores in the same towns…
Inuvik was a friendly place, but that doesn’t mean we felt comfortable there. There was a stark contrast between the visitors driving their RV rigs, and the people that lived there that were just trying to survive. While there were mostly smiles from the locals, it was clear there were a lot of people hanging around with nothing to do.
Inuvik is built on permafrost which creates a lot of challenges. The biggest of which is to not warm the ground below. If you warm it up, it compresses and sinks. So not only are the buildings built on raised platforms with air circulation underneath, so are the utilities. All the “hook ups” are run through above ground conduits. It just looks really weird, but apparently works. Then these conduits are heated (to keep the water pipes from freezing). It looks like a maze of dryer vents running throughout the city.
We also walked our campground a couple of times. Making the drive up to Inuvik creates a bond with the others that have successfully completed the challenge. You smile and exchange stories when you run across people you’ve met earlier that day, yesterday, and over the course of the past week
So Chuck likes to eat/drink what he likes to eat/drink. Some might call him “picky”. He thinks of himself as having a mild brand preference. And this has created some shopping challenges on this trip. You’d think all of North America would have peanut M&Ms. Not a chance. There have were several small towns where we scoured every grocery store in town (both of them), looking for peanut M&Ms. And in an area of the world that was explored due to the discovery of gold, you’d think that that was what peanut M&Ms were made of when you see the price! Well, we all have our bad habits. It has been fun to get down to the Yukon and find all the packages also labeled in French. Monster energy drinks have been another challenge with regard to availability and price. We pay about $1.40 per can at home. Normal gas station price can be $2.00 to $2.50. These things must be expensive to ship up here!
