Saturday, July 2

What a long train ride. Seriously. It ended up taking 18.5 hours. I'd say the average speed of the train was around 30mph...that's why it took so long. The reason it's that long is because the train runs over permafrost, and when it gets very warm out it can wreak havoc on the tracks, causing it to be a very bumpy ride.
One we dropped the miscreants off in Ilford, the train ride was much quieter and I was able to catch a few winks of sleep.
(insert sleeping on train pic)
We saw plenty of neat stuff along the ride; lots of tundra and plenty of cool plants, but also signs of civilization:



...Or whatever you call that. It seems like most of the structures that we saw along the rail were either abandoned or something that is used only in the winter. We even came upon this structure:



I wonder what the beach looks like.

So after lots of hours in the train, we finally pulled into Churchill!!!!!!!!!!!!! I hope that these many exclamation points get the point across that I'm pretty excited.



We got into the 10 passenger van from the center and took off down the road. It's very bumpy, and that's because of the permafrost causing heaves all over the place.



The town of Churchill is not much to look at. The houses are kinda crummy and the place is generally junky looking. But you get that in most of these tundra towns; lots of old rusty crap with no place to go.
We arrived at the center where we are staying. It's called the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, or CNSC. It's been in operation since 1976 and has hosted many many students and researchers from around the globe. It's in a really neat location, near an old missile testing base:






That funny looking building to the right is the missile launch structure. The rest of the buildings there are where they did research and whatnot, and there were all these connected walkways so they could get from building to building without freezing their toes off! The facility was used by the American military for cold war related stuff up until the late 90's with the last rocket being fired by Canadian weather researchers in the 2000's. Would be cool to see a rocket being launched from there, I bet it was sweeeet!
So we arrived at the center, had a little lunch, then had orientation with the building. The centre used to be housed next door, in a much less modern facility. We are in their brand new state of the art building which is still kinda being finished. Josh and I have our own room, bunk bed style. It's quite nice! Big window facing the view in that rocket picture above.
After lunch, we went out in the van for a bit, and it was a little gloomy but not bad. Foggy but still manageable. We mainly saw some birds and drove around some of the main roads we take daily. We saw a willow ptarmigan and a jaeger on a nest.
Then it kinda started raining so we retreated back to the centre since our van windows fogged up so darn much :( But arriving back this early was nice because then we could unpack and get settled nicely. We then had a delicious supper, of which we can eat all we want! Here is a little slice of Churchill humor on the lunch menu:



So after supper we saw a slideshow of Lorne's on the plants and flowers of the area which we will see. Very nice to see them up close to know what to look for!

So not a very exciting day, but that's what happens when you get off of a train after 18 hours; you tend to not want to do a thing!

Location:Train to churchill, Churchill Manitoba