-----A long-awaited sleeping-in session commenced into the morning hours, and upon awakening at around 10:00 we prepared for a day on the town in the Yukon capital. Our first stop was at the Yukon Transportation Museum, which is adjacent to the Whitehorse airport. It's extremely noticeable for the enormous DC-3 perched outside on a pivot, which is their weathervane. We admired it for a while, despite the biting cold wind, before going to the door of the museum.

-----To our surprise, it's not considered late enough in the month of May for them to be open every day, so we though that we had to console ourselves with the outdoor exhibits. We took pictures of ourselves on a rusty old small-gauge railway locomotive used during the early days of transportation infrastructure in the Yukon during the Gold Rush years. Fortunately, when a big truck pulled up, a man got out and told us that we could go into the museum; although technically closed, they still would let tourists in upon a knock. There appeared to be only one employee: a girl who operated the gift shop. She let us in and gave us a few pointers as to where to go first.

-----The highlight of the museum are the two epic hangars filled to bursting with cars and trains and historical figures important to getting around in the territory. The rough-hewn nature of its inhabitants struck us as morbidly hilarious, such as sending a tiny rail car with men inside down the treacherous White Pass & Yukon Railway line as a daily condition check.

-----Beyond this hangar lay the real hangar, colder due to the open door on the far side, which held more modern bits of equipment whose oldest vehicles dated to the ALCAN and CANOL projects. While the ALCAN is best known for giving birth to the Alaska Highway and changing the nature of the far northwest forever, the CANOL—short for Canadian Oil—was a lesser-known side project that brought in crude oil from Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories down to a Whitehorse refinery. The project was abandoned for being much too costly after World War II ended, but its transportation legacy lives on; the rough "Canol Road" is maintained—barely—by the Yukon government in the summers, and the lessons learned brought new technological innovations to the region.

-----We briefly toured the outside exhibits, but the wind chill made things feel just a few degrees above freezing and the overcast weather overhead did not help. Thus, we climbed back in the car and went downhill to the city center of Whitehorse, which is a cute little frontier town whose ordinances dictate nothing over four floors and for whom rugged history is something to embrace.

-----We drove through the A&W in town to try their onion rings; we'd seen the stores all over Canada but today would be one of our last chances at actually going by. The reason why is that I'd heard good things about their onion rings, and I agree with the assessment that they're chronically underrated. They were not greasy, which is a fault in most onion rings.

-----Our next stop was at the MacBride Museum of Yukon History. While the outside is undergoing construction and renovation, much of the museum is accessible—save for Sam McGee's Cabin, which once belonged to the namesake of the Robert Service poem. Service got the idea for "The Cremation of Sam McGee" from a conversation he'd had with someone else, and then used McGee's name for its poetic cadence.

-----While the MacBride Museum ostensibly covers all of Yukon history, the main focus is on the times since the Gold Rush. A gallery of taxidermied northern animals leads the way to a downstairs gallery on the Alaska Highway, while a separate building covers the details of the wild and wacky lives of early settlers and pioneers. You've got to be a little bit off in the head to leave behind everything to go to a desolate and unforgiving place, and indeed the characters about whom we read lived up to every anticipation. Their nicknames alone (such as Soapy Smith) are enough to tell you of the interesting lives these people led.

-----The names of the pioneers who came to the land to prospect and survey are forever immortalized in the towns and highways and ferries that dot the landscape. These include George Black, once the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons who had raised up a regiment from the sparsely populated Yukon to fight in the first World War. His wife Martha abandoned two of her kids and divorced her first husband to travel with her brother to the Yukon.

-----After the MacBride Museum, we went to Klondike Rib & Salmon, a quaint little place located in one of the two oldest buildings in Whitehorse, dating from 1900. The place has grown up around it and integrates new construction in a way that makes the whole thing feel like an eclectic cabin. Advertised as a "Taste of the Yukon," their menu does not disappoint; there was everything from halibut dip to falafels. There's even sweet tea, something we've not seen as an option since Tennessee—although we opted for lemonade from their balsa-wood drink menu.

-----I got a burger which had a custom patty of bison, elk, and wild boar meats. The taste was something I couldn't quite place, but it was a muted gamey smokiness. The richness was compounded with cheese, bacon, several onion rings, plus strips of pickles, a huge tomato, and more lettuce than I knew what to do with, all on a thick pretzel bun that made for a sandwich that was so large that only half of it could fit in my fully unhinged mouth with a single bite. I was full by the time I finished the burger and had little room left for the delicious (and obviously fresh) fries.

-----My dad had the salmon dip while my mom got the halibut dip. Each came with a large buttery hunk of focaccia bread that soaked the excess cream, served in skillets. Artichokes and onions complemented the fish in the cream sauce.

-----[side note: I've always sort of felt like the Yukon was Canada's Idaho. Both are a) vaguely triangular, b) in the northwestern quadrant of their respective countries, c) associated with potatoes, and d) mostly completely uninhabited.]

-----After a little more rest and relaxation in the room, we struck back out down the hill into town to do a little more sightseeing. We went to Shipyards Park, where we layered up with our hoodies and raincoats for the intermittent precipitation and the biting wind, and were able to see a bit of the Yukon River. After returning to the warmth of the car, we went to Rotary Peace Park, where we were able to walk down to the Yukon River on a bed of smooth rocks. Across from this park was the S.S. Klondike, an old-fashioned steamboat, which—while closed—still struck a striking picture against the distant Whitehorse cliffs.

-----Tomorrow: Alaska.