Tag Archives: History

Going to the Dogs

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Thursday 29 September 2022 – Until we finally boarded our flight out of Churchill, the schedule for the day was in a more or less perpetual state of flux, as in no-one knowing what the flux going on. The first spanner in the works was that our flight would now be at midday, much earlier than originally planned. So Mark had to make some last-minute changes, involving finding our group some packed lunches and squeezing today’s excursions into a smaller window.  Later on, we found out that the midday flight had been cancelled and we were now going to fly out at (the original time of) 17.45. This meant that Mark, having crammed everything in, now had to find other diversions for us.  He managed all of this with aplomb and many phone calls.

Our first port of call was something that I hadn’t very high expectations of – very wrongly, as it turned out.  It was a visit to a dog yard.  Dogs have long been used to haul sleds and since there was no snow on the ground I couldn’t quite see how it could be made interesting. I hadn’t reckoned with the passion, energy and sheer charisma of “Big Dog” Dave Daley, the owner of the yard

who was accompanied by two of his sled dogs.

Where I had expected a routine presentation about dog sledding, he treated us to a brilliant, impassioned and amusing exposition about the relationship between man and dog, between dog and dog and between man, dog and the race he created and runs every year he can, the Hudson Bay Quest, a 220-mile wilderness race which knocks the more-widely-known 80-mile Iditarod into a cocked hat. In the HBQ, one man, 10 dogs and a sled have to complete the race unsupported except for a half-way stop for a compulsory 6-hour rest (for the dogs, not the men) and a reload of the hay that is needed to create rest dens for the dogs en route.  Extraordinarily, this distance can be covered in 40 hours, by someone who knows what he’s doing.

Much of the substance of Dave’s presentation consisted of underlining what “knowing what you’re doing” means when it comes to running a dog team, and this involves having a deep relationship with every dog, knowing its strengths, weaknesses, health and preferences.  Some dogs make good lead dogs, but would be no good as “wheel dogs”, the raw muscle power that runs just ahead of the sled, for example. (There are also point dogs and swing dogs, each with a role in the team, and “knowing what you’re doing” involves understanding and exploiting this.) Some dogs prefer to run on the left, some on the right. Some prefer sprints, some are better at marathons.  “Knowing what you’re doing” involves being a planner, physiotherapist, psychotherapist, nutritionist, physician, breeder, salesman and trainer.  Dave currently has 47 dogs in his yard and every single one of them seemed to be bursting with energy and enthusiasm when it became clear that they would be working that morning,

because after talking about the theory behind running a dog team, we actually got the chance to get a tiny insight into the practice.  There was no snow on the ground, but the dogs still need to work to keep them healthy and happy, so outside winter they pull carts; we got the chance to ride the carts whilst they were being pulled – two guests and a driver per cart, with the dogs in teams of five, rather than 10.

The energy and enthusiasm that was bursting out of the dogs increased, if anything, when they were hitched up to a cart – which had to be anchored to a huge boulder to stop them immediately rocketing off into the forest.  Jane and I were lucky – Dave picked on us as his passengers, and his team had seemingly impossible amounts of energy waiting to be harnessed.

As you can see from the video, there was a choice of track, but each ride was about 1½km, and so Dave calls the outing on the carts the “Ididamile”, which is rather lovely.  It was huge fun being carted along by these bundles of energy – and because Big Dog was our driver, we went faster than the others which necessitated veering off onto a forest path, rather than staying on the main drag, so we didn’t run into the other teams!  All in all, it was an absorbing, entertaining and thought-provoking couple of hours.

The next item on the agenda was a visit to Churchill’s museum, but before we did that we called in at the Churchill Post Office to get our passports stamped.

On the door of the Post Office building is, erm, posted a summary of encounters with bears.

So even though we’d had to search high and low for a bear, it seems as though bears are finding people, even this early in Bear Season.

The museum we visited is called the Itsanitaq Museum and is dedicated to Inuit culture, with wonderful collections of carvings and artefacts which are among the finest and oldest in the world, dating from 1700 B.C.

It used to be called the Eskimo Museum, but Eskimo is a term which has fallen out of favour; itsanitaq is an Inuit word meaning “things from the past”. This was explained to us by Lorraine, the lady in charge, who gave us a short introductory spiel,

and included further information about the principal peoples of the area.

Among the exhibits in the museum was an explanation of the script that we found on the Calm Air aeroplane safety leaflet.

It turns out that the symbols weren’t in themselves a language, but rather a phonetic code enabling the various indigenous languages to be written down.  So our safety leaflet was probably in the Cree language, that being the largest of the populations in the area.

We had a lunch stop at the Churchill Northern Studies Center, a non-profit facility that promotes and facilitates research and education about many issues that affect the northern regions, with an emphasis on sustainability and climate change. They provide accommodation and facilities for visiting researchers as well as carrying out their own research and educational programmes.

They allowed us to have our (clearly rather hastily-assembled) packed lunches in their canteen, and also hosted a tour of the place, which is sustainably designed and ecologically and environmentally secured so as not to affect the area around it.

After this, having discovered that the rescheduling of the rescheduled flight left us with time on our hands, Joe drove us slowly around the back roads whilst we searched again for bears.  Unfortunately the bloody bears had buggered off again, so all we saw was another Arctic Hare

who was reasonably close and so a bit easier to spot among the rocks than our elusive ursines. The sun came out and so this one perked up a bit

before it started raining again, with a stiff and cold wind blowing, so it hunkered down again, looking distinctly unimpressed with the weather.

Mark gave us a final chance to get images of the town, starting at the Churchill sign

and we managed to catch a couple of grab shots of artwork we hadn’t recorded before

and also an Interesting Church (see our Iceland pages).

And, barring visits to a couple of gift shops, that was that for Churchill.  We went to the airport and bade farewell to the guys who had made the last three days so interesting and varied.

We duly arrived into Winnipeg just in time to crash into the hotel’s Sports Bar where the group got together for a final time to consume (in some cases rather inadvisable) quantities of drink.  It was a good way to end this section of our holiday which was great fun, excellently guided and shared with some nice people.

Tomorrow is just a travel day – Winnipeg to Halifax, Nova Scotia via Toronto.  It’s unlikely that I’ll have anything interesting to report about two flights, so the story is To Be Continued in a couple of days.  I hope to see you then; bye for now.

Québec Quests

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Wednesday 21 September 2022 – Our second and final day in Québec dawned fine and sunny (according to the UK Met Office) or at least not raining (according to looking out of the hotel window). Given that it’s such a historic, individual and photogenic city, we felt we had to get out and explore; Jane had some specific sights she wanted to see as part of any wanderings on our part. To aid us in our quest to find out more about the place, we joined another “free” walking tour, this one led by Sam

who described himself as having a beard and a sense of humour – accurate in both cases, as it turns out. He was full of knowledge and amusing ways of putting stories across, often referring to the city’s official motto – “Je me souviens” – I remember.

To start with, we had to find Sam. The appointed meeting place was the fountain by the national assembly building

to reach which we walked up Rue St-Louis, which is an attractive street

containing the city’s oldest house

and its own city gate.

(not the original one – Sam explained that originally there was a much narrower opening, as befits a gate designed to restrict city access. After the British defeated the French here in 1759, they bolstered the defences in order (successfully) to resist the subsequent French siege. The city walls were saved from destruction in the late 19th century by the then Governor General of Canada, Lord Dufferin, who was enough of a visionary to realise the value of future tourism and so had the walls preserved and the gates widened to open the city to visitors). The fortifications, along with the rest of Old Québec, were designated an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 and remain the only intact fortified colonial settlement in North America north of Mexico.

The National Assembly building has several statues in niches all over its façade. Sam identified two of them.

On the left – General Wolfe, the winner of the British fight for Quebec; on the right, the Marquis de Montcalm. History is written by the victors, and it’s unusual, and rather refreshing, to see any recognition on historic buildings of the people who came second. I think this is possibly a reflection of the thoughtful approach that Canadians seem to take to many aspects of life.

Sam is obviously a film buff, as he referred to a couple of films during his tour. One of them was “Catch Me If You Can“, a caper in which Tom Hanks tries to nab Leonardo DiCaprio as he blags his way across the world. The other was an Alfred Hitchcock thriller called “I confess“, about the dilemma facing a priest who receives confession from a murderer. Sam showed us the actual house where the “murder” was committed, something other guided tours don’t cover.

The current occupant of the house is clearly familiar with Sam leading tours past his house, as he came to the window and waved to us all.

Our tour then passed between two libraries – a modern one housed in an old French church and an old one housed in a more modern building which was originally a gaol.

Passing the Clarendon hotel, a building on a site with history that goes back as far as 1685, and is thus far older than the ancient-looking Chateau Frontenac

our next stop was at the Town Hall.

It’s a very imposing building, and doubtless Sam dispensed some interesting nuggets about it; but I became fascinated by its fountains.

After this, we headed (past a building with a very bizarre artwork attached to it)

towards Old Québec,

which is (a) historic, (b) photogenic and (c) contains many of the things Jane wanted to see. These included the “Breakneck Steps”, the city’s oldest steps, so called because they were once rather rickety as well as steep;

then round the corner to this:

which, presented as above (with some photoshoppery), looks like a city scene, but is actually the Québec city mural, telling the story of Québec;

indigenous artwork in a street off Place Royale;

and another wonderful building-side mural

(again, here, with image manipulated – it really looks as below).

The whole area is desperately photogenic

and gives what Sam asserts is the best view of the Chateau Frontenac – and who am I to argue?

Trees in the above photo actually hide the Funicular, which people can use to travel up to the hotel square if they are prepared to pay the 4 CAD fare.

The Place Royal features the outline of where the first building in Québec stood

and Sam pointed out that this was where Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio actually stood during the filming of “Catch Me If You Can“. Just round the corner is the ultimate Selfie Spot,

where one can ruin a perfectly decent city scene by appearing in it, on the Old City Centre Swing. There are any number of photo opportunities around this part, and the place really, really feels like Paris.

It isn’t, of course, but is often used in films to portray France. In the above, the piano accordion is actually an electronic instrument and you can’t move far without the smell of popcorn pervading the air – giveaways that you’re not in France after all. (Another one is the ubiquity of tin roofs; in France, lead is more commonly used.)

That ended Sam’s entertaining and informative tour, so we headed back up to the hotel up the

172 steps you need to climb.

For once, instead of eating at the hotel, good as its meals are, we had booked an early dinner outside, at a place recommended by Ian Burley called Le Hobbit. The restaurant is in Rue St-Jean, which gave us an opportunity to walk to it past the Observatoire de la Capitale, which is on the 31st floor of a building next to the National Assembly. So once again we headed up Rue St-Louis, pausing to take a photo of Churchill and Roosevelt

(these sculptures celebrating their meeting here in 1943 to plan the D-Day Landings) and found our way to the top of the Observatoire building. One needs to book, and, helpfully, there’s a QR code on the ground floor for paying one’s entrance. But we didn’t have internet access, and it needed help from a sympa young chap who was guarding the Observatoire on the top floor to help us pay our entrance fees. That achieved, we had a few minutes to wander the four sides of the Observatoire, looking at the views of the city around us.

Then we crossed to Rue St-Jean, which is jolly picturesque,

includes the Church of St. John the Baptist which gives the street its name

and has some interesting shop windows.

We had a very good meal at Le Hobbit (thanks, Ian). Then we wandered back to the hotel in the gathering gloom, via the Old Town, to see if it was as picturesque at night as it is during the day.

This signalled the end of our time in Québec, as we had to be ready to catch an earlyish train to Montréal the next morning. It would have been nice to have had more time to explore – a lesson learned for future holidays of the pith and moment of this one – but it was lovely to have seen what we did. Jane thought that maybe it was just a little bit too picture perfect, but I loved the place. Maybe we’ll be back; who knows? But tomorrow is onward! to Montréal, so please come back to see what we made of things there.

Plane About in Ottawa

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Sunday 18 September 2022 – The weather forecast for the day was rather wet and gloomy, and in any case we’d explored most of what was accessible on foot from the hotel, so we made a plan that said we’d take the hop-on-hop-off bus to view the further reaches of the city.  So, how was the weather?

At this point in the day, it was drizzle rather than historic rain (and I wonder if anyone in Canada had thought about labelling this image “A Historic Reine” as a sort of bridge between English and French-speaking locals?).  What rain that there was made photography from the top deck of a (closed-top!) moving bus rather tricky.  We managed a couple of shots of passing street art

and decided that the only destination worth getting off the bus in the rain for, was the Aviation and Space Museum, which has a mind-boggling display of aircraft of all sorts,

as well as a much smaller area dedicated to satellites and other Space-related materials.

There follow a number of photos of aeroplanes, for which I make no apologies, as I’m passing interested in them, particularly historic ones; and there’s a decent joke towards the end, so it may be worth your while reading on.

We accidentally timed things right such that we were able to join a guided tour, which went round highlighting certain areas where planes were grouped.  Early Aviation had a section and featured this original Blériot XI, which was a huge commercial success for Louis Blériot after his pioneering flight across the channel.

World War I had a section, of course.  It contained a version of my favourite WWI aircraft, the Sopwith Camel (from reading Biggles books as a lad), modified to launch from a ship.

An intriguing section was dedicated to “Bush Planes”, a term we hadn’t come across before, and which means aircraft modified to meet the unique travel requirements of Canada’s wild northern regions (i.e. no runways and no airfields but lots of rivers and lakes). Below is a reproduction of one of the first attempts, with, next to it, the remnants of the original as eventually extracted from the lake it crashed into after an unsuccessful landing.

Also on display was a De Havilland Beaver, probably the most successful Bush Plane in Canada’s aviation history, here shown with the unprecedented volume of cargo one could fit into it and still be able to get airborne. One certainly managed to ferry us from Victoria to Farewell Harbour earlier in our trip, as you will remember because you were paying attention, weren’t you?

An interesting angle on Bush Planes is shown with this Junkers W-34, a plane to which one could fit floats, wheels or skis to help access a variety of terrains.  You can see a model of an airman taking a wheel off, presumably to leave the floats active.  To do this, he had to lift the plane somehow, and the exhibit shows that he had to chop down trees to make logs to use as a crane, rig up ropes to lift the plane and be able to change its undercarriage type.  He was alone, so he had to be pilot, navigator, mechanic, lumberjack and structural engineer, all rolled up into one.

Of course, aeroplanes were used to distribute mail, but in the severe winters, landing and taking off could pose a problem if the fuel lines froze. The solution was to have a hatch in the floor of the aircraft so the mail could be parachuted down.

There was, of course, a section dedicated to WWII aeroplanes.  One display had a Hurricane, a Spitfire (another plane I love) and their enemy – a German ME 109, which I’d never seen close to before.

The museum has a Lancaster, the first time I’ve ever been in the same room as one. It’s their biggest exhibit in the hangar, displayed with bomb bay doors open to show how the passing air would arm the bombs by spinning their propellers, before they were dropped.  This was OK provided all of them were dropped, but problems were inevitable if something prevented dropping the entire load of up to seven bombs, as landing with an armed bomb under the pane was bound to end in tears.

There were also several aircraft from the Cold War era, such as this Lockheed Martin F18 (foreground) and Avro Arrow (background).  The Arrow was far more advanced (Mach 2.5) than the F18 (Mach 1.8), but never made it into production and all examples destroyed save the portion on show here.

We learned that many aeroplanes used as trainers were painted a bright yellow.

This served several useful purposes: identifying aeroplanes to steer clear of if in operation; making it clear that they were not combat aircraft; and making it easy to find the pieces in the event of a crash.

There were several charming elements in the display, such as this helicopter with its rodent grin;

a rather poorly-placed warning over an aircraft’s gun

since if you were able to read it you were already in serious danger; and toy planes for the kids to whizz about on;

One exhibit was called an “ornithopter”, which I was very curious about, having had my head filled with images from sci-fi books and films such as “Dune”. It turned out to be “Snowbird” – the first successful human-powered aircraft – very light, and with an enormous wingspan.

And so passed an enjoyable 90 minutes at the museum.  But I can’t allow you to leave without the joke I promised.  In all of the aeroplane exhibitions I’ve seen before, the plane were all “ours”, i.e. British/Allied, rather than enemy.  By having at least one German plane on display, this museum allowed me to show you a picture of one of them Fokkers. (Decent joke??? Hah. Ed)

I suppose using the hop-on-hop-off bus to visit just one place in Ottawa wasn’t the most effective use of resources, but we really enjoyed the museum and did get to see some other places outside the immediate environs of Parliament Hill, albeit not very clearly.

We had to scamper rather back to the hotel, as it was raining heavily by that stage. But after a late lunch/early dinner the rain appeared to have abated, and we needed a reason to shake down the food (and gin).  So we went for a stroll along the banks of the Rideau Canal in the gathering evening.

We passed the Senate,

the Shaw Centre (what is it with Canada and GBS? Anyone?),

an odd-looking boat outside the Shaw Centre,

some bridges,

(the second of which we used to cross the canal and walk back on the other side), that boat again

(very strangely laden), and our final glimpse of the city and Parliament.

This pretty much ended our time in Ottawa.  Because of the overwhelming presence of government, it’s a slightly odd place, but one we found it very enjoyable to learn about and walk around.  Tomorrow we must leave, taking another Via Rail journey to Québec, where we have a Fabulous Country Tour awaiting us.  Let’s hope the weather is clement; please come back in a couple of days to find out.