I've also made a serious miscalculation in the equipment department. I'm attempting to do the trip with just my tablet, using a USB adapter to download my photos and a bluetooth keyboard for blogging. Unfortunately my daisy-chain of adapters to read an SD card on to the tablet is choking, and I'm unable to download more than a few files at a time. Combine that with my tendency to photograph everything that moves and most things that don't and I'm simply unable to organize my photos on the go. Sadly that's going to impact my ability to post things to the blog, but I've grab some of the files, so I'll get some pictures up here just as soon as I'm done whinning about the vagaries of modern technology. My bluetooth keyboard was having trouble keeping up with my typing, but it seems to have suddenly improved. My tablet needs about 15 minutes to weep quietly to itself if it's been offline for more than a day. It appears that the weeping has subsided and I may now go about my day. So, on with the show!
Obviously a lot of catching up to do, so I'll have to be brief, but I'll do my best to get caught up. We flew out of Toronto on Saturday morning on route to Ottawa. We stayed at the Four Points Sheraton in Gatineau, which turned out to be a good option as it's right across the road from the Canadian History Museum, which in turn is right across the river from Parliament. All-in-all a good point for exploring Ottawa largely on foot.
The highlight of our first night was definitely the meal. On Graydyn's recommendation we went to Atelier, which is a molecular gastro restaurant in Ottawa. Definitely a new experience for Euphy and I, and it was all we could talk about on the way home.
The next day was ours to explore Ottawa... sort of. We struck out from our hotel only to find our path blocked by a marathon. I guess I should really look up events in the towns I'm visiting before I get there. We were eventually able to navigate around the race and get across the bridge to Ottawa, but by that time it was raining hard, and we were sharing a small umbrella. It took us well over an hour just to get to Ottawa and find a restaurant for breakfast, at which point we were each soaked on one half of our bodies. We managed to make our way to the Parliament buildings though, and killed a bit of time in a nearby mall. By the afternoon the weather had improved dramatically and we spent a lot of time just wandering around by the river. The day started out rough, but we made the best of it.
Monday was largely a travel day. We made our way down to the airport in Ottawa and then got on our flight to Whitehorse. There's a stopover in Yellowknife just to refuel, but all told it's about 7 hours of travel. Fortunately you get a bit of that back with the 3 hour time difference, so it was still the afternoon by the time we got in. Our first stop here in Whitehorse is Sundog Retreat. It's actually about 20-30 minutes north of Whitehorse, so it's pretty remote, and the night skies have been goregous!
I hope you like that picture everyone, it's all you're going to get for now. My upload speeds are pretty dreadful here, and on the tablet I can't quickly resize images for speedy upload. Any more than that and I'd be old and grey by the time I got this post posted. I'll try to get more up later.
Yesterday morning a guide from Sundog showed us around Whitehorse. We wrapped up the tour at Miles Canyon, just south of the city. It's an incredibly beautiful place and I can't wait to get some picture up. After the tour our guide Ken dropped us at Budget where we had a rental car waiting for us. We'll have that for the rest of the trip, which is going to really help; I really don't think we could see everything we wanted up here without a car.
We drove out to a small museum near the airport called Beringia, which focuses on the animals of the ice age that crossed the land bridge from Asia. For a small facility it was incredibly well put together and had a wealth of interesting information.
After our time there we headed out to Muktuk Adventures for a tour and dinner. Muktuk is run by a retired Musher (sled-dog racer) who still trains teams, but also takes on retired or injured dogs to give them a happy place to spend their non-racing lives. There are over 100 sled dogs on the property... I'm still not entirely clear on how I managed to get Euphemia to leave. After a dinner of Arctic Char, Caribou sausage, Elk, and Bison, we headed back here to get a glimpse of the Aurora. We've been fortunate that the night skies have been clear, but unfortunately the Northern Lights haven't been putting on much of a show the last couple days. Hoping for better luck as soon as I'm done writing this.
Today was spent mostly on the road. My driver's licence expired at the end of August, and so I've just got the temporary paper one... in Toronto. So yeah, Euphy has had to do ALL the driving. She's been a trooper about it though. We drove north today along the Klondike Highway and just stopped at any place that looked interesting and we could safely pull off the road. Brilliant way to do a road trip really. The scenery up here is beautiful and it was a great way to spend the day. Unfortunately we wrapped that up with a trip down a poorly maintained road that I (erroneously) told Euphy we could manage. It turned out to be a bit much for the little Focus we had rented and we bailed half way down the road... and had to go find a car wash. Good times.
Well, I apologize for glossing over the many adventures we've been having, but this little keyboard is cramping my hands. With any luck our access to WiFi will be more reliable going forward and I'll be able to post more frequent (and thorough) updates. For now though, night has fallen and I'm going to go see if I can spot some fire in the sky.
1 comment:
I fear the slideshow for this adventure, try to keep it under 10 000 pictures.
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