Housekeeping Day in Tok; Alaska Highway - Tok to (Near) Delta Junction [260626]

(Posted 2600816) - We had scheduled a "housekeeping day" for our time in Tok, and arriving a day ahead of schedule gave us a little more free time to get things done - which ended up being a good thing, since we had an "unexpected surprise" waiting for us.

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Tom was awake at 7 a.m. Friday morning, and started researching Wi-Fi calling in bed (thank you, Fast Eddy's Wi-Fi!).  One of the reasons we had wanted to bring along the Starlink in Standby Mode on this trip was that it was supposed to be useable for Wi-Fi calling where there was no cell service available.  However, when Tom went to try this one night in Canada, he found that neither the Red Pocket (AT&T) line nor the Xfinity Mobile (Verizon) line on his iPhone had Wi-Fi calling enabled, and he had been completely unable to enable it on either line.  It seemed that Red Pocket required you to send them an email request with some additional info in it to get Wi-Fi calling enabled (which Tom did that morning), but Xfinity Mobile should have been able to be enabled automatically and would require contacting Customer Service to sort out - "joy".

We got up around 8:20 and proceeded with our morning routine.  Then Christine cooked up another batch of Instant Pot Lasagna, to be saved for upcoming boondocking dinners.  Finally, we had Travato showers and did our backlog of "dirty" dishes, while Tom attempted to chat with a series of Xfinity Customer Care Agents to get his Wi-Fi calling enabled.  (Tom eventually gave up on getting Wi-Fi calling working on Xfinity Mobile.)

Having done everything we could from the Fast Eddy's parking lot, we proceeded down the street to the Tesoro gas station, which reportedly had a number of facilities in the rear that you could use "for free with fill-up".  We went inside to ask about the mechanics of how to prove the fill-up to use the facilities in the rear, and they pretty much were as loosey-goosey about the whole thing as the Tags station in Watson Lake had been.  We filled our tank, and proceeded to the back.

Someone was using the dump station, so we went to the potable water station first and refilled our fresh water tank without incident.

Then we proceeded to the dump station, which had one of the most bizarre arrangements we have seen in a while.  If you park with the dump "hole" on the driver's side like normal, the non-potable spigot ends up being on the passenger's side about 35' away from the hole!  They have a colossally long rinse hose attached to the spigot (and you can imagine how many times it's looped around its hose reel), but the end is unthreaded (and no matter how carefully we parked the van we'd never be able to connect our 25' hose directly to the spigot and our 5' dump hose to the dump hole at the same time) - so out came our adaptor to fix that problem.

The "hole" itself was very odd.  Instead of the standard 3" hole to receive a 3" dump hose, it was an 8" square opening that tapered down to a 3" hole over about a 1' drop.  We have no idea why anyone would design such a thing, since no one's dump hose would be able to lock in to it.

But then came the biggest shocker of all:  Tom went to pull out our dump hose, only to find it completely missing!  This is what the cap on the sewer hose storage compartment is supposed to look like:

And this is what it actually looked like (minus the carabiner, which we've since had to put on):

Notice how the latch is missing?  It appears that on one of the gravelly stretches between Destruction Bay and Tok yesterday, one or more rocks got kicked up that completely blasted the latch off of our storage tube cap.  Unconstrained, our dump hose then slid out one of the many times that Tom was dodging potholes on the road.

This would've been a moderate to major problem if it weren't for the fact that we had installed a secondary storage tube with a 15' dump hose kit in it under the running board before the EotRT, "just in case we're somewhere where the 5' hose won't reach".  In the 3 years we've owned the T42 we can count on one hand (with fingers left over) the number of times we've had to pull out and use the 15' hose.  The location is inconvenient to access - you have kneel on the ground and almost lie down to reach under and around the running board - and because the storage tube runs the length of the van the end cap (which needs to be removed to access the hose inside) tends to get jammed up with road grit and becomes hard to open.  And that's just on normal roads.  With the recent Alaska Highway dirt and grit, it took Tom over 5 minutes with gloves, a mini screw driver, a squirt bottle, and eventually a slip-lock wrench to get the cap open.  After that, though, the rest of the dump and flush went relatively smoothly.

Then we moved on to the car wash.  Tom had never used a public car wash - or even a pressure washer - before, but a nice man from Montreal who had just come over the Top of the World and was washing his Class C showed him how it all worked.  Here's how the T42 looked "before":

Tom started by pressure washing the entire van, which was highly effective at blasting off most of the dirt, even out of the hinges, handles, and nooks and crannies in the body; Tom estimates that 80+% of the dirt came off with pressure washing alone.  (It also blasted off more of the black trim paint from the driver's side that had recently started peeling, but it was worth it.)

The remaining 20% light tan tint that couldn't be pressure washed off had to be manually scrubbed off.  Buckets and long handled brushes were provided, but you needed to provide your own soap (luckily we knew about this ahead of time, and brought car wash concentrate with us).  Scrubbing down and then power rinsing the four sides of the van (in sections) took considerably longer than the initial power washing did, but also considerably less time than doing things with a ladder, a lightweight scrub brush, and a wash mit at home does.  When Tom was done, the T42 looked the best she has since we left home (although the front end still has a number of bug stains that are going to take considerably longer to get rid of):

Unfortunately, although there is technically a drain in the ground the bulk of the surface area is covered in dirt, which becomes mud, which splashes as you wash your vehicle.  Tom's pants and shoes were quite spattered by the end.

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With our housekeeping chores now complete, we headed back up the street to the Visitor Information Center where we browsed the displays.

The VIC also had a small gift shop area.  This is one of the items you could purchase there:

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After lunch in the parking lot of the VIC, we were ready to leave Tok.  We continued NW on the Alaska Highway.

Our stopping place for the night was 78 miles outside of Tok (and 20 miles short of our first planned stop for tomorrow):  the Gerstle River Wayside.  The wayside was actually fairly large, with a nice little inner loop that had fairly isolated little parking spots on the sides.  We did a circuit and checked out all the spots, and then returned to the one that we liked the best.

Before settling in for the evening, we walked down to the river to check out the view.  Along the way, we were greeted by the local "welcoming party".

Dinner that night was pre-cooked rice with leftover fried halibut, fried clam strips, and an onion ring from Fast Eddy's and some canned peas for Tom, and leftover Fast Eddy's pizza and microwaved frozen peas for Christine.  After that the laptops came out and we journaled, researched dump hose replacement options, and worked on trip planning and blog #10.  And at around 8:45, the bunnies came out to frolic.

Tom had also received a rather frustrating response back from Red Pocket telling him that Wi-Fi calling can be enabled from our end, with a set of generic instructions that he had already tried multiple times.  So he responded with a link to their own help page that explained how it had to be enabled from the Red Pocket side first, along with a screenshot of the error page he gets when the generic instructions are followed.  🙄

Bedtime was around 1 a.m.  Tomorrow we'd be reaching the end of the Alaska Highway.