Relaxation

Thursday, July 31, 2014

This was a slow day for me and for most of the rest of the crew too I suspect. After some breakfast it seemed everyone headed off in separate directions. I ended up spending a few hours sitting at the restaurant table uploading some of the blog entires. A few from the Hinton crew and Suzanne came back to say they’d arranged a flight to Tuktoyaktuk for the afternoon.

About noon I got a call from my older brother, Jim, who lived in Inuvik for 17 years and he gave me a list of friends of his to visit. Richard Wagers and I were having lunch and after we’d eaten we headed off to meet Carman Jones, who own’s the famous Mack’s News Stand on the town’s main street. Her brother and Jim’s oldest son, James, were room mates in Edmonton for a few years. Then it was off to the Town Hall to see if Floyd Rowland, the Mayor, was in. He was, and we sat in his office and chatted for about half an hour with him recounting life in the Arctic (he’s from Tuktoyaktuk) and his life as a Mayor and a past Premier of the Northwest Territories. Finally, we headed to another government building to meet Peter Clarkson, a friend of Jim’s who has trekked all over the Arctic for both personal interest and scientific study.

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The famous “Igloo Church’ on Inuvik’s main street.

After dinner everyone retired to the room that Richard and I were sharing to try and distill the weeks’ paddling into what I call the The Good, The Bad, and The WOW. I recorded all those thoughts and will set them out in a separate Blog entry. Richard took over then and had set up a game a few day earlier in which each of us had to jot a note about something that no one would know about us. It went around the room a few times and was a hilarious end to getting to know each other over the last few weeks.

Richard purchased a bottle of Sparkling Wine to toast the journey and to begin the evening’s stories.

We all went to bed late as one might suspect.