As my one year Barrhead anniversary came and went, excitement still lingered for me: I had vacation time now! My mother, grandmother and good friend from home travelled from Ontario and graced me with their presence. A great adventure lay ahead for the four of us and Annabelle, my vibrant blue hatchback.
We dug out a map and planned out our route. The final destination? Yellowknife.
How I managed to squeeze myself and my clothing, three other people and their clothing, along with four people’s worth of camping gear into my tiny vehicle...I’ll never know.
Annabelle is officially the best car, ever.
Our first destination was the shortest haul of the trip: Barrhead to Hutch Lake, which is near High Level. After a relatively uneventful drive, the first night of camping was upon us. We picked out our campsite, unpacked the car, and began to set up the tent.
We crawled into our humble camping abode for the night, only to discover that one of the air mattresses had mostly deflated. Too tired to fix the problem, my friend and I decided to tough it out.
This was a decision we came to regret a few hours later, when we awoke to an almost completely deflated air mattress. At that point we also realized our choice of attire was not heavy enough to fight the frozen air that had arrived.
Shivering and laying basically on the ground I had two choices: spread my body weight out to get some kind of comfort while risking hypothermia, or curl up to conserve my body heat and deal with the hard ground and rocks digging into my back. Either way I knew I wasn’t getting much sleep that night.
Morning came with sunshine and the graceful sound of a distressed flock of ravens at 4 a.m. We hit the road early.
The closer we got to the Territories, the thicker the bug graveyard on the front of my poor car became. The moment we slowed our pace, we were surrounded by a cloud of alarmingly large black flies.
There were so many of them it sounded like we were inside a beehive. I’m still not sure what they were interested in, but I’m thankful it wasn’t us. I think if they were in the mood for biting people, we would not have survived the trip with our sanity intact.
Tired and haggard, we reached the Northwest Territories border with great excitement. Fighting the flies, which were irritatingly trying to fly in our ears and up our noses, we quickly snapped a couple of pictures before retreating to the car.
We stopped in the booming metropolis of Enterprise, population 87 (literally, and I thought Barrhead was small!) for lunch before continuing to our final destination.
We passed through a wide variety of scenery. There were big trees and small trees, skinny trees and scraggly trees. There were light and medium grey rocks, round rocks and misshapen rocks, even giant rock walls.
Rocks and trees, and trees and rocks…
We arrived at our campsite in Yellowknife, only to find that it didn’t have a drive-up option. In fact after we parked, to get to our site we had to walk and clamber over a field of, surprise, more rock! All while dragging our camping gear, might I add.
After lugging about 800 pounds of who knows what to our campsite, I wearily looked up to see my mother frozen and wide eyed.
“Turn around,” she said.
All I could imagine was turning to see a man-eating grizzly looking for lunch. I was too tired to run. I was doomed.
Fortunately for me I only came face to face with a beautiful and elegant Arctic fox. The campsite was worth it.
Next week: How my sweater got covered in pike slime
