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: