Winnipeg and Arrival In Churchill

Yesterday I spent the day in Winnipeg, the Capital of Manitoba. This city is sometimes considered the cultural capital of the Prairies. We visited the legislative house and the Manitoba Museum. We learned that the Legislative Building was built by a Free Mason and that it could definitely be the setting for the next Dan Brown novel. The building is quite unique and may be filled with symbolism but I am not going to hold my breath waiting for that movie to be filmed. The time in the Museum provided detailed information about the cultural and biological heritage of Manitobe. For me, my favorite part of the tour of this city was "Bears on Broadway."

Today the plane came to take us to Churchill, the Polar Capital of world. We are excited and we can't wait to see them, but not until tomorrow. Today we will have to settle with a tour of the Museum and a walk around main street before our orientation tonight. One other special attraction-the Olympic Torch was here today and we got to see the young man who had gained the honor to run with it. He was the grandson of our bus driver.

We stroll downtown and decide to visit the grocery store. The town is the main street of Kelsey Blvd. The grocery store tells the story of this small town on Hudson Bay. As we walk down the aisles we find strawberries at $8.39 a pint and bananas for $3.59 a lb. and asparagus for $13.89 a lb. And I guess you might have been happy to pay this if the groceries if they had even been there but most of the aisles were empty.

Tonight we learned all about the largest carnivores-the polar bears. Now we wait with great hopes of seeing them tomorrow from our tundra rovers. Keep your fingers crossed. This is a really long way to come if the bears are all still sleeping. They have not eaten since the ice broke up last June and they are waiting for it to freeze again. It has started to freeze but is not hard enough for the bears to hunt for seal so if they are lazy we might not see any.

I thought tonight was over but the knock came on the door with the cry the lights are out! We all rushed out in our pj's and parkas to see the Northern Lights. They really do dance across the sky. Not a bad ending to the first day in Churchill!