WOW - even getting here was a total adventure... on Thursday in the airport in Winnipeg I was asking about taking the bus to the train station when a woman I recognized from the Chicago airport chimed in... I had already pegged her as someone who’d be going to Churchill as she was the only other person wearing heavy hiking boots amidst a summer flurry of sun dresses and flip flops. Together we got on the 15 and sped through a succession of ethnic neighbourhoods... Ukrainian, Korean, Chinese, Spanish-speaking... and the clusters of people boarding and exiting the bus were just as varied too. Our driver made sure we changed at the right place downtown and we found ourselves at 123 Main Street, Union Station, only $2.40 Canadian poorer. A taxi would have cost at least $12 and not been half as much fun.

The train station sits near the confluence of two rivers, the Red and the Assiniboine, and the park behind it is appropriately called “The Forks”. Coolest thing about it was a HUGE skate park heavily populated by middle school and high school boys doing fabulous skateboard and bmx bike tricks. I took lots of pictures.

At the train station the passengers had divided themselves in two groups... in one corner was a small cluster of middle aged people on vacation and on the other was a huge tribe of Mennonites, long skirts fluttering, head scarves flapping, blue eyes winking. The boys were wearing baseball caps... I don’t know if they need to keep their head covered, too, or if they were just cool. I could only understand the most random phrases of their archaic German although I was eavesdropping like crazy.

I could write a whole novel about the train ride as it was like an Agatha Christie set-up... even excluding the 40 Mennonites who left the train after only an hour. At one point there were only nine passengers... a Parisian couple, a professorial couple from Concordia in Nebraska, an 80 year old train enthusiast with his son and daughter-in-law, the bird researcher I met at the airport and myself. Wonderful conversations!

On Saturday morning I awoke to the train being parked in Gillam. Heavy rains had washed out the track farther north so VIA Rail Canada chartered a private jet to take us the last leg. We had the day to hike around the town and we were taxied out to the airport in the late afternoon. The flight only took 35 minutes, turbo props spinning noisily all the while and we could witness the trees fading away and the flat land become increasingly pox marked with lakes and those becoming increasingly iced over.

Churchill Northern Studies Center is a small cluster of buildings huddled under an ENORMOUS sweep of sky. There are watch out for polar bear signs everywhere and it still wasn’t dark when I went to bed at 11:15 PM. Our lead scientist had given us our first briefing, we signed up for KP and I sneaked up into the observation dome for one more look at a long flat landscape tinged pink, glistening white and shiny black and brown before climbing into my top bunk.

This morning at six it was as bright as if it were high noon. The kitchen opens in ten minutes and we can fortify ourselves for our first day of research. Tonight is summer solstice. That means a bon fire and a huge celebration!