A few great trips
08/07/14 05:42
Susan and I are blessed to have a lovely home. We have a luxury of space in our home that once housed us and our children and even then had an extra bedroom for guests. We have spread out a bit, using some of our extra room for an expanded library, space for our projects and such. It is the second home that we have owned. Before that, we have a wonderful home provided by the church we worked for. And before those days, we lived in a series of different apartments, each adequate for our needs at the time.
I am well aware that there are people who are homeless and many others who live in substandard housing. There are homes that pose health risks to those who have to take shelter in their mold-infused walls. There are places where people live that are firetraps and inadequacy equipped with the basics for a comfortable life.
From almost any point of view we are very fortunate to have such a nice home.
Even with such a very good, safe and secure place to live, I am completely stricken with wanderlust. I love to travel. I don’t mind sleeping in strange beds in strange places. I’ve been known to unroll my sleeping bag under a tarp or tent. I’ve even slept in a pickup truck or car on occasion. the joy of seeing new places and discovering different points of view is far more wonderful than the temporary discomfort of having my accommodations differ from the usual.
The past few days, I’ve been on an epic canoe trip that started at Reindeer Lake on the border between Saskatchewan and Manitoba, hundreds of miles north and a bit west of Lake Winnipeg. Through a series of travels upstream, portages to and from lakes and finally crossing a divide and heading down stream again with more portages, the initial goal was North Nueltin Lake across the Nunavut border. From there we’re heading down the Thlewiaza, sometimes just called Big River all the way to Hudson Bay where we’ll head south, hugging the shoreline all the way to Churchill.
These days Nueltin Lake is a destination for those who have enough money to hire very expensive fishing vacations in remote fly-in lodges. There is trophy fishing for lake trout, grayling and northern pike. These days there are accurate maps of the region and gps devices to assure that one always knows one’s location. But I’m not making the trip these days. I’ve been traveling in 1948, when that country was largely unknown to outsiders and the path of the Thiewiaza was unknown even to the indigenous people who lived to the west of its flow or those who clustered at its mouth on the big bay.
My companions for the trip have been Farley Mowat and Charles Schweder, principal characters in Mowat’s book “No Man’s River.”
I do a lot of my traveling that way.
So far I have been on several major expeditions that take me to the most northern and often unexplored places north of the tree line in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. I’ve run rapids in canoes, slogged over long, muddy portages and spent days slowly making my way across the tundra and muskeg. I’ve winter traveled with dogs, wondering whether or not the food would hold out and how much longer we could keep going in the face of such violent storms. I’ve waited out the weather in snow shelters, cabins, tents and a few times in simple depressions at the base of trees - all without getting cold and in the comfort and luxury of my bed.
In fact I do quite a bit of my traveling while sitting in my Lazy-boy recliner in my library in the basement of our home.
Every once in a while I take one of the world’s great train rides. I’ve explored Australia on the Ghan, taken a couple of epic journeys on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and taken the Orient Express from Paris through Vienna to Istanbul. The latter trip is significantly more adventurous than the modern luxury ride that ends at Budapest. I’ve even taken one trip on the Simplon-Orient Express (so named because of the Simpton tunnel) through Milan and Venice before heading to Belgrade and Sofia on the way to Istanbul.
The world of books has enabled me to travel more frequently and to more distant places than are accessible through my sometimes limited budget of time and money. It isn’t that I don’t like to travel in real life. I do. And we have been very fortunate to have been able to make a trip through Europe and an additional trip to England. We’ve traveled in Australia and I’ve been to Costa Rica several times. And we’ve made some wonderful road trips across the United States and Canada. The desire to travel is a constant companion and I spend quite a bit of time pouring over maps and thinking of routes.
One day Susan and I plan to drive to Alaska. By the time we actually get on the road, I will have made several pilot expeditions checking out the route and planning the stops by reading The Milepost. I get a new copy of that venerable guide every couple of years or so and we are still several years before affording that particular trip.
And it is unlikely that I will ever take a canoe trip down the Yukon from Lake Laberge to Dawson City. I’m unlikely to figure out how to photograph grizzly bears, moose and wolves from a raft on the Tatshenshini River. Odds are against one of my hand-made canoes heading down the Thelon river or any of the pristine and sometimes unnamed rivers east of Great Slave Lake hundreds of miles from any road or community. that didn’t stop me from reading Alex Hall’s “Discovering Eden: A Lifetime of Paddling Arctic Rivers.”
There are still a lot of epic journeys ahead in my life. Some of them will involve being away from home for many weeks. Others will consume less fuel.
I am well aware that there are people who are homeless and many others who live in substandard housing. There are homes that pose health risks to those who have to take shelter in their mold-infused walls. There are places where people live that are firetraps and inadequacy equipped with the basics for a comfortable life.
From almost any point of view we are very fortunate to have such a nice home.
Even with such a very good, safe and secure place to live, I am completely stricken with wanderlust. I love to travel. I don’t mind sleeping in strange beds in strange places. I’ve been known to unroll my sleeping bag under a tarp or tent. I’ve even slept in a pickup truck or car on occasion. the joy of seeing new places and discovering different points of view is far more wonderful than the temporary discomfort of having my accommodations differ from the usual.
The past few days, I’ve been on an epic canoe trip that started at Reindeer Lake on the border between Saskatchewan and Manitoba, hundreds of miles north and a bit west of Lake Winnipeg. Through a series of travels upstream, portages to and from lakes and finally crossing a divide and heading down stream again with more portages, the initial goal was North Nueltin Lake across the Nunavut border. From there we’re heading down the Thlewiaza, sometimes just called Big River all the way to Hudson Bay where we’ll head south, hugging the shoreline all the way to Churchill.
These days Nueltin Lake is a destination for those who have enough money to hire very expensive fishing vacations in remote fly-in lodges. There is trophy fishing for lake trout, grayling and northern pike. These days there are accurate maps of the region and gps devices to assure that one always knows one’s location. But I’m not making the trip these days. I’ve been traveling in 1948, when that country was largely unknown to outsiders and the path of the Thiewiaza was unknown even to the indigenous people who lived to the west of its flow or those who clustered at its mouth on the big bay.
My companions for the trip have been Farley Mowat and Charles Schweder, principal characters in Mowat’s book “No Man’s River.”
I do a lot of my traveling that way.
So far I have been on several major expeditions that take me to the most northern and often unexplored places north of the tree line in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. I’ve run rapids in canoes, slogged over long, muddy portages and spent days slowly making my way across the tundra and muskeg. I’ve winter traveled with dogs, wondering whether or not the food would hold out and how much longer we could keep going in the face of such violent storms. I’ve waited out the weather in snow shelters, cabins, tents and a few times in simple depressions at the base of trees - all without getting cold and in the comfort and luxury of my bed.
In fact I do quite a bit of my traveling while sitting in my Lazy-boy recliner in my library in the basement of our home.
Every once in a while I take one of the world’s great train rides. I’ve explored Australia on the Ghan, taken a couple of epic journeys on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and taken the Orient Express from Paris through Vienna to Istanbul. The latter trip is significantly more adventurous than the modern luxury ride that ends at Budapest. I’ve even taken one trip on the Simplon-Orient Express (so named because of the Simpton tunnel) through Milan and Venice before heading to Belgrade and Sofia on the way to Istanbul.
The world of books has enabled me to travel more frequently and to more distant places than are accessible through my sometimes limited budget of time and money. It isn’t that I don’t like to travel in real life. I do. And we have been very fortunate to have been able to make a trip through Europe and an additional trip to England. We’ve traveled in Australia and I’ve been to Costa Rica several times. And we’ve made some wonderful road trips across the United States and Canada. The desire to travel is a constant companion and I spend quite a bit of time pouring over maps and thinking of routes.
One day Susan and I plan to drive to Alaska. By the time we actually get on the road, I will have made several pilot expeditions checking out the route and planning the stops by reading The Milepost. I get a new copy of that venerable guide every couple of years or so and we are still several years before affording that particular trip.
And it is unlikely that I will ever take a canoe trip down the Yukon from Lake Laberge to Dawson City. I’m unlikely to figure out how to photograph grizzly bears, moose and wolves from a raft on the Tatshenshini River. Odds are against one of my hand-made canoes heading down the Thelon river or any of the pristine and sometimes unnamed rivers east of Great Slave Lake hundreds of miles from any road or community. that didn’t stop me from reading Alex Hall’s “Discovering Eden: A Lifetime of Paddling Arctic Rivers.”
There are still a lot of epic journeys ahead in my life. Some of them will involve being away from home for many weeks. Others will consume less fuel.