Btw, we flew out of LAX exactly seven weeks ago yesterday, and in the meantime never ONCE did we turn on a television. Utterly glorious. (other than the Dodger baseball part, of course)

Boring flight from Montreal to L.A. This one’s over, but stay tuned.....lots more travel adventures in the pipeline!

The Old City of Quebec is fun.

So, we’ve sailed away from Quebec City, and are on our way to Montreal, where we will disembark. NOT HAPPY about this.

Canadian t-shirts are wonderful.

I support the opposition. (Usually)

We visited the National Assembly of Quebec, the (approximate) equivalence of an American State house.

The good folks of Sept Iles wished us well as we sailed away.

I wish I could zoom in on this one, or at least do an edit with a manually-added arrow.....but in the top third, barely right of center, there’s a *climber*. Nuts. Reminds me of about 100 years ago, when I worked at the Pantages Theatre, and I struck up a chatty working relationship with the assistant manager of the bank next door to the theater. She was a skydiver - I told her she was nuts to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, she told me I was nuts to want to be 90 feet underwater. And so it goes.

Ok, doubling up a bit here - yesterday we were in Saguenay, Quebec, and took a local zodiac trip (LOVE zodiacs!) around Saguenay Fjord.

We are, after all, in the land of the Québécois.

Wildflowers and wild berries everywhere!

A fine museum of the Innu (as opposed to Inuit) people.

In Sept Iles, we arrived to find the locals having set up a huge batch of boiled sweet corn on the wharf as we disembarked. It was very tasty and sweet.....although I’D do it better on my grill.....😎

The bears simply patrol the bottom of the vertical cliffs, waiting for eggs and/or young chicks to accidentally fall (there are literally millions of birds nesting in these cliffs, all around the island). In the second pic, they’re feeding on a bird, thus the bloody paws.

Going back a week or so, we were on Akpatok island. I posted a couple of distant pics of the polar bear Mom & cubs - since then, one of the (many) naturalist guides, who had extremely good and expensive photographic equipment (he was actually our zodiac guide that day), posted his own pics.

We’re in Havre-Saint-Pierre, in southern Quebec. We took a local boat charter out to Ile Niapiskau, to see the limestone monoliths. They’re sedimentary formations, left over from millions of years ago, when the sea was hundreds of feet higher, and then receded.

I know I keep saying it....but, I truly never tire of this.

A good rule of thumb is.....if you get a haircut before you travel (as I always do), the trip is a good length if you need another haircut when you get back.

One last sea day today - we are headed to the St. Lawrence Seaway, and tomorrow we’re in Havre-Saint-Pierre. At this point, with less than a week to go in the trip, I start doing the usual pout-and-sulk routine. The trips seem long enough when I book them, but somehow too short when we near the end. Grrrrr.

There are ongoing archaeological projects, roped off from tourists, of course.

The L’Anse aux Meadows site has several recreations, giving a very general and speculative idea of how the site may have looked originally. (Minus the wooden chimneys, probably 🙄)

These slightly raised mounds are all that survives of the ancient Norse turf-roof buildings.

We avoided poor weather and have anchored in St. John’s Bay, near our originally planned anchorage. L’Anse aux Meadows is generally regarded as the only universally agreed Norse settlement in North America. Over the last 6 weeks we’ve done a pretty comprehensive indoctrination about Norse settlements, but they’ve been in Iceland and Greenland, rather than North America (although Greenland is arguably North American)

Weather has kicked up a bit so our call to L’Anse Aux Meadow in Newfoundland is in question. So far the ship is rock steady, but it’s 11:00pm and apparently the next few hours might get a little interesting. Bring it on! (In his daily address, the Captain did mention that we’re not too many nautical miles from where the Titanic went down. Guessing we’re a little better equipped & prepared, more than 100 years later.)

They did have a modest museum, of which they were quite proud (with good reason). There was a carefully constructed stone cairn, called an inuksuk, which reflects the flag of the Nunavut province of Canada, along with Niqirtsuituq, the North Star (in blue). Happy Valley - Goose Bay is in Labrador/Newfoundland rather than Nunavut, but close enough.

Maybe the most interesting thing about Happy Valley - Goose Bay was that our tour bus was the local school bus. And that, naturally, they didn’t have a microphone & sound system onboard - the guide talked to us through a police bullhorn. They say they only get 1-2 ships a year, so perhaps understandable.

Turns out, Happy Valley - Goose Bay is not one of the more riveting travel destinations. Didn’t take a single picture. Sorry.

We’re in port again, this time Happy Valley - Goose Bay. Yes, really.

Currently sailing down the Labrador coast of Canada. Back to back sea days, so no onshore adventures to report.

Yours truly, resplendent in full Arctic zodiac regalia.

On Akpatok Island, we sailed around, scouring the area for polar bears. Came across a mother bear and her two cubs. I don’t have fancy schmantzy camera equipment with two-foot-long lenses, just my iPhone, so just take my word for it.....those three tiny white blobs are, indeed, polar bears.

Then again, tonight it’s mid-30’s and windy, so while I love it, I don’t always spend extended hours reveling in it. 🥶

I will never, ever get tired of going out onto our little veranda and seeing this sort of view, watching the magnificent ocean float us onward, as the day/night draws to a close.

next up, Akpatok Island.