On the Beach at Hudson Bay – Churchill, Manitoba This Trip Was

Inuksuk (Inuit rock landmark) on the beach at Hudson Bay – Churchill, Manitoba This trip was different from many that I‘ve done in recent years. While most of my travels have focused on cities, this one was almost exclusively rural. It involved driving, train travel, and—unexpectedly—a plane flight. The trip would take my sister Margaret and me north to the windswept shores of Hudson Bay at Churchill, which bills itself as Canada‘s port on the Arctic Ocean. The trip brought back memories of the journey to the Northwest Territories my family made when I was in high school and also of my trip to Iceland a few years back. While most people visit Churchill to encounter nature (particularly polar bears), a much bigger focus of this trip was history. Remote Churchill is one of the oldest settlements in North America, the site of a trading post set up by the Hudson‘s Bay Company three centuries ago. We followed much of the history of the famous British fur trading company and their French competitors, the Northwest Company. We also learned about Canada‘s many native groups, and in particular the Metis, the mixed European—Indian inhabitants who make up a large part of the population in the north. We found to our surprise that ―Metis‖ (the French word for mestizo, which I don‘t think I‘d ever heard said before) is pronounced like ―Matey‖ in English (and ―Mateys‖ in the plural); hence the subtitle of this travelogue. I wasn‘t positive this trip would even happen. A week and a half before the scheduled departure, my ―new‖ (to me) car broke down west of Chicago. It turned out the main drive belt had snapped, which the service people told me often leads to parts overheating and fusing together, necessitating a total engine replacement. Fortunately my situation wasn‘t quite that bad. While I had to rent a car while mine was in the shop and shuttle back and forth to Rockford, Illinois, in the end things did manage to get fixed. It was the priciest repair I‘ve ever had (over $1,000), and I wasn‘t totally certain the car would make it through this trip. It did, though. In fact, I was surprised and impressed with just how well it ran. Hopefully it will continue to serve me in the years to come. I‘ll begin the day before our ―official‖ trip started, because that‘s when Margaret came over. I ran a few errands and then spent a bit of time tidying up my apartment this morning. The place needs a deep cleaning, but it may be Christmas before it gets it. I did achieve the goal of making it presentable for company, though. Margaret arrived around 11:30, and we spent quite a while visiting. In the mid-afternoon I took her out to Garrigan to see all the new stuff there. There was major construction this past year, as we built a new gym and some office and classroom space. Things were almost completed, and I‘d just seen the finished product myself recently. It was kind of fun to show the place off, and it really looks quite nice. We had a late lunch at Cinco de Mayo, the local Mexican restaurant in Algona. We each ordered fajitas. I had chicken, while Margaret‘s were beef. We returned home and enjoyed a quiet evening just chatting. I‘d picked up some gouda cheese on that trip to Chicago where my car died, and we enjoyed that with some crackers in lieu of supper. We also had some toaster strudel and ice cream for dessert. We stayed up talking until around midnight, and since it was quite humid outside I left the air conditioning on overnight. This should have been a short, easy day of driving, but it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. I did manage to prove my car could handle a long haul, though. We were up around 7:00 and lingered over coffee and more toaster strudel. Around 9am we set off. I drove east on U.S. 18, through Britt and Garner and on to Ventura. We took a county road north from there to highway 9 and then headed over to Interstate 35. We continued northward into Minnesota and eventually stopped at a rest area just south of Owatonna. The morning drive had been remarkably uneventful, but when we stopped I realized there was a problem. I always carry my wallet in my front pocket, and it wasn‘t there. In addition to my driver‘s license, the wallet had my credit and debit cards, which would be vital for the trip. I searched under the car seat, in case it might have somehow fallen out, and I double checked to make sure it wasn‘t in the balloon pockets of the cargo shorts I was wearing. The wallet was nowhere to be found, and I knew we couldn‘t continue without it. So, after driving two hours north, we turned around and drove two hours back to Algona. It took a bit of searching to find the wallet even after we got back home. It turned out it was in my bedroom, which is somewhere I pretty much never put my wallet. Normally it stays overnight on a shelf that divides my living and dining areas. I always know where it is, and it‘s easy to put in my pocket in the morning. Since Margaret was staying in the living room, I‘d cleared stuff out a bit and put it on my dresser instead. Since it was in the wrong place, the normal morning routine was screwed up, and that‘s why I‘d left without it. I‘d written up a tentative ―schedule‖ for our drive. Originally we‘d left this morning an hour ahead of those suggested times. By the time we‘d made this major detour, though, we were three hours behind schedule. Fortunately there was nothing all that important we were planning to do today, but it was still annoying to backtrack so much. I was already getting kind of tired, so Margaret took over the driving on the next leg. While she‘d improve markedly through the trip, it was quite clear today that it had been a while since she‘d driven a manual transmission. Every car I‘ve owned has been a stick shift, so working the clutch and shifting up and down is second nature to me Margaret had to re-learn things, though. She did fine, but it did take a while to rebuild the skill level. We stopped for gas in Albert Lea, just north of the Minnesota border. The cost was $2.659, which was more than it was in Algona. This was also essentially an unnecessary fill, since had we gone straight north we‘d likely not have needed gas until we stopped for the night. I took over the wheel again at Albert Lea. There were two rather nasty construction zones on I-35, with DOT signs that advised ―EXPECT LONG DELAYS ON WEEKENDS‖. We‘d made it through the first of those without incident earlier today, but by afternoon there was indeed a long back-up. As is a frequent problem in Minnesota, they didn‘t say in advance which lane would be closed, instead advising drivers to ―take turns at merge‖. That meant everyone stayed in their lane until the last possible second and then battled it out when two lanes were reduced to one. If they‘d had simply said something like ―left lane closed 2 miles ahead‖ (as Iowa usually does), it would have given people time to get over and avoid the merging problem. As it was we crawled along for almost twenty minutes and came to a dead stop on multiple occasions. We drove up through St. Paul and stopped next at the McDonalds in Hugo, at the north end of the Twin Cities. We each had a small blueberry pomegranate smoothie, which made a refreshing treat. It was quite a hot afternoon. My car has air conditioning (which is a step up from the Metro I used to have), but it isn‘t the most effective there is. It was good that only the beginning and end of the trip would turn out to be hot. Hinckley Fire Monument – Hinckley Minnesota (Margaret Sullivan is standing beside the monument in the picture at left.) We drove on up to Hinckley (halfway between Minneapolis and Duluth), which was our destination for the night. The biggest event in Hinckley‘s history was an enormous forest fire that destroyed the town in 1894, killing 418 residents. There is a museum dedicated to that fire which we‘d hoped to see this afternoon, but unfortunately because of our backtrack it was long closed when we arrived. We did see the Hinckley Fire Monument, an enormous obelisk in the town cemetery that marks the mass grave of the victims. The monument was interesting, and sometime when I‘m back in northern Minnesota I‘ll try to stop at the museum again. We spent fifteen minutes or so just driving around Hinckley. I‘ve stopped at the Hinckley exit on I-35 many times, but I‘d never before been into the actual town. It looks fairly prosperous and features well-maintained homes on tidy lots—exactly what you‘d expect of a town in rural Minnesota. What was conspicuously absent was much in the way of business.

Load more