Oh Canada!

 It has been a long time since Joe and I went on an ADVENTURE!!!!  The last one, in March 2020 ended with us stuck in Peru for a few days, when the government closed the borders (both ways….  Which still doesn’t make sense).  So we are hoping for a big adventure, but would prefer to stay with the plan this time……

We started planning for this almost 2 years ago:  I had read somewhere that in Churchill, Manitoba, it is illegal to lock your car or house between November and February, because people need to be able to find a safe place quickly if they run into a polar bear.  It will surprise no one to learn that my reaction to that fact was “. I’ve got to go there!”.  So Joe and I looked into it, and booked something even wilder than that:  We are going to a lodge in the middle of nowhere (Churchill provides a high bar to define the middle of nowhere, but we are going to a lodge in the tundra, about 200 miles from it!.)

I’m excited!  But first, we need to get there…..  This morning, we started unreasonably early (as it seems every trip starts….) with a 4am pick up for a 7am flight to Toronto.  The weather provided lovely sights of the Throgs Neck and the 2 bridges that cross it (in NYC), as well as of downtown Toronto and Lake Ontario as we landed.   From there, we flew to Winnipeg, where we will spend 2 days before our group meets for dinner on Wednesday evening.  I am not completely sure that Winnipeg is worth 2 full days of tourism…..  it is aggressively flat!!!!  As one can see from the plane. 

 But I wanted to make sure we would get here with plenty of time because airports have been crazy, and I also thought that, if we were going through Winnipeg, we should see some of it!   It is the center of the Canadian prairie and tomorrow, we will go to a park where some of the prairie is preserved and there are still some bisons.  We will also go to the zoo, which is supposed to be very nice.  And then on Wednesday, we will go to downtown Winnipeg - even the natives seem to think that this is plenty of time to see everything there is to see around here…..

We are staying at an airport hotel, where we had an objectively lovely dinner.  We are now very tired and trying not to go to bed before 8pm…….  Which is hard because the sun sets at 7:32pm….

The flat horizons provides a great sunset over the airport runways…

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