Where are you from???

The most common question that we were asked on the road was “where are you from?” To most this is a fairly simple question to answer – not quite so for us.

To begin with, we live in Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory, which is in the far north west corner of Canada. Unfortunately there are some Canadians that don’t know where this is, let alone the majority of Americans.

By default, we seem to have created a multi-tiered strategy to answer the question:

1) if we were in Canada, then we would answer “Whitehorse, in the Yukon” (just to help cover the gap of where is Whitehorse… although not many people give provincial context to Edmonton, Victoria, Saskatoon etc.)

2) if we were in the USA, then we would start with “the Yukon, up near Alaska”.

• 90% of the time, people responded to that with “WOW – ALASKA, that’s really cool – you are a long way from home!” To which we just went with it and said “Yep”, not seeking to clarify and explain
• 10% of the time, people would respond with questions or comments related to their trip to Alaska or the Yukon as part of their bucket list adventures and we would happily explain more

3) Sometimes a judgement call was made on the spot and we would just say “Alaska”  and not even make the effort to explain the Canadian component of things.

• On the rare occasion we got questions, we would then take the time to explain that we were from the Canadian side of Alaska – unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of clarifying question on that front. Definitely a lack of north american geography knowledge out there!

Our one exception to all of the above was if we were mountain biking. We would always take the time to explain where we were from, that we have top rated trails in North America and many times I would haul out our trail maps from my camel back and show them off! We proudly gave out Boreale Mountain Biking’s contact info to many bikers and bike shops…