Travel: Pond Inlet (not Winnipeg) – Sybaritica

Well, just a very short post today… Yesterday, the wife left for another conference in Winnipeg and, tomorrow, I will be heading back to my old home and stomping grounds of Pond Inlet for the quarterly Court sessions.

It struck me, as I was looking at my photo albums, that I have very few pictures of Pond Inlet taken in summer (which, I suppose, is not that all that surprising given that there is very little summer up there to photograph). The view you see above was taken from the living room window of our house in the last few weeks of February after the sun made its first appearance.  If you look very closely, you might be able to just faintly make out a dog team tethered on the sea-ice in the middle ground of the picture… 

This picture is one of the very few summer shots I have from Pond Inlet and was taken from just outside our house one August. Each summer, the community would get 6 or 7 cruise ships visiting (almost all of them from Europe) and the passengers would get taken ashore in rubber boats to walk around town for an hour or two. There is not a lot for visitors to do or buy in Pond Inlet but they would certainly have some terrific photograph opportunities.

The plaque you see above is the crest of HMCS Protecteur, one of the refuel and supply ships for the Canadian Navy. On my last visit to Pond Inlet, my colleague and I were given space in the local hamlet administration offices to interview clients and I was very excited to come across this plaque on the wall there as I was aboard the ship when it visited the high Arctic back in 1975 and 1977. Back then, of course, I had no idea I would be living in the community some three decades later.

Anyway, I checked the weather for Pond Inlet and it is a balmy 9 degrees there this morning (which is actually three degrees warmer than here, surprisingly). It is supposed to be a bit cloudy there tomorrow, but nothing to keep me from landing, I don’t think, and the rest of the week’s weather looks good. With luck, and a bit of spare time, I should be able to get some decent summer pictures of the place and, when I return I will share a few in a slightly more interesting post…

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