Friday, November 5, 2010

We're Home!

We're finally home! It was a long journey over many days and an exhausting end to a fantastic experience.  Our first attempt at departing resulted in our transport flying over the airport and turning south due to heavy fog.  Our new friends and community elders made their way to the see us off.  Love this parka made with wolverine on the collar.



We headed back to the school for another night on the floor, but on the plus side an extra night with our great hosts.

With the tickets rescheduled and an ideal plan in place to get us home the same day, we awoke and  headed to the airport with high hopes.  Everything was looking good when the plane arrived early and the ground crew started to unload the cargo.  Large containers called 'igloos' with a new load of groceries for the Northern Store were the first to come off and were easily removed.  Next up was a Dodge Dakota pick-up that didn't make it on the last barge in before the ice formed.  This process took three hours and left us late for our connector to Toronto and having to spend a night in Edmonton.  But, how many times will we see a truck being removed from a plane?  While others were probably annoyed, some of us thought it was worth the wait.... a truck on a plane, pretty darn cool!


An early morning wake in Edmonton and a quick flight home found us in Toronto for the last leg of our journey back to Stratford. Thumbs up Jamie.  Fitting with our travel mishaps the bus wasn't scheduled to pick us up, leaving us to 'enjoy' a couple of hours in Pearson Terminal One. 



We're now back from our journey to the great Canadian North and readying for the arrival of our new friends from Cambridge Bay.  We've given the students the weekend to take in the magnitude of what they've experienced.  Next week they'll share these thoughts on the blog.

Thanks for following.  The Screaming Gang.