Aug 3 - Home.

Made it home... and now several weeks of arguing with the cruise company about how much of our money they are going to refund begins...

Aug 2 - Quebec City

July 31 - Montreal

July 29 – Ottawa

After seeing that last minute flights to the US would be cost-prohibitive, we've decided to salvage this holiday by doing a driving tour of central Canada: Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. It's perhaps for the best, since given our taste for long-distance, exotic holidays it's unlikely that we would ever actually book a vacation to somewhere so close-to-home and thus we would never see them.

When we discussed seeing Ottawa with people on the boat (who were mostly from Ontario) they insisted you needed at least three or four days to see it properly, since the museums alone would take a couple days. We nodded sagely and scratched our chins thoughtfully as we discussed the appropriate order to visit the museums, when in reality we had no intention of visiting any of them. With the possible exception of science museums, we find museums to be a bore and don't generally bother with them. They feel too much like learning, and we don't go on vacation to learn anything. However, we both did laugh at this sign:

We picture a stern father telling his kids "We're going to a museum today no matter what. If you're good we're going to the one on the bottom sign; if you're bad we're going to the one on the top sign."

In the end it took us a short afternoon to see what we wanted to see here, and most of that was taken up with a tour of the parliament building.

The real highlight of Ottawa is how fantastically efficient their public transit bus service is. I work with a few people from Ottawa and I think they've mentioned this in the past, but I really had to see it to fully understand how good public transit can be if a city actually wants it to be. I now understand that Calgary has terrible bus service because there is no political will to fix it.

Anyway... the blog has taken a bit more of mundane turn but our holiday has drastically changed direction.

July 28 – Civilization.

They managed to book another charter plane today and got us back to Ottawa. Civilization! Internet! Huzzah!

So we're back after a very short "adventure", having never made it off of Greenland and into the Canadian arctic. Disappointing, and we did not manage to catch the "arcticus feverus" like the cruise director ensured we would. On the plus side, when we get back I look forward to jokingly making this response:

Q: Did you see Nunavut?

A: We saw none of it.

While the tour company had a bunch of people at the airport to start sorting insurance claims, flights home, etc., we decided to flee the airport as quickly as we could. We just wanted to get away from them, and have decided to try to salvage the remaining six days of this holiday somehow in central Canada or possible somewhere in the US. We'll deal with fighting with the tour company when we get home.

So the rest of the day was spent on the hotel internet trying to figure out how to make lemonade out of these arctic lemons...

July 27 – Mission Aborted.

Unfortunately, this morning the captain finally declared the ship not fit to cross the Davis Straight to the ice on the Canadian side, so our Arctic Safari is officially scuttled. The good news is that they managed to secure charter flights out of Ilulissat this afternoon so we made plans to rent a car when we got back to Ottawa and try to salvage some holiday by exploring central Canada and perhaps the Northeastern US. Then we got the bad news is that they can only get us back to Kangerlussuaq and can't find a charter back to North America until Wednesday (three days from now). At the time of this writing they're still trying to find any other flights, and some of us have indicated that we'll accept a flight anywhere, even to the destinations that are easier to schedule from Greenland: Reykjavik Iceland, or even Denmark. (One Brit in the group said he had been texting his travel agent back home and she said all those flights are booked solid for a week.)

So for now we are stuck in Greenland, staying off the airport in Kangerlussuaq. It's really just an large airstrip with a couple of surrounding buildings, originally built by the US Air Force post-WW2 but now just serves as an entry point for the rest of Greenland. Our bus driver told us he's worked here for 20 years and in that time there have only been 7 deaths: "You don't come here to die. You come here to work. Go home to die.")

Amazingly they managed to find enough rooms for all 120 of us, though our room is interesting: very hot buck luckily it has a massive 4-ft by 4-ft window that swings open; unluckily it means the curtains must stay open and also it opens directly onto the runway. This means that tonight we're going to have to figure out how to sleep in a hot room in full daylight with the sounds of service planes taking off and landing all night. Should be fun.

In the evening they had rented out one of the large halls for the ship's entertainer to sing us songs to try to keep us amused for the evening. It was an interesting building where the bottom floor was a night-club whereas the overlooking balcony was a museum. At least I finally got to see a muskox:

July 26 – Ilulissat

Morning finds us docked 240 km north in the “metropolis” of Ilulissat, a fishing town of 5000 people and 6000 dogs. (Sadly, the dog population is out-of-date since climate change has hampered the fishing trade and they can't afford to feed all the dogs.)

For our first excursion we hiked through town and then onward to the Ilulissat ice fjord. This glacier calves more icebergs than any other outside Antarctica.

In the afternoon we headed out to explore the base of the fjord in Zodiacs, getting a closer look at the icebergs and also collecting some 30,000 year old ice to take back to the ship to have with scotch for after dinner drinks.

After dinner brought more bad news that the captain and chief engineer would still not sign off that the engine repairs were satisfactory to tackle the ice on the Canadian side. The crew were going to be working through the night to try to get it sorted by morning, but in the meantime we were stuck in port at Ilulissat for another night. The passengers, mostly retired seniors, had had enough and a long, angry Q&A session ensued. When it finally let out well past 11 o'clock, we went up on deck to make another attempt at midnight sun. Sadly, the harbor at Ilulissat is surrounded by high rock ridges so while the Sun was probably up at midnight, we couldn't see it.

And I never did get that scotch.