Our friend Jean did a guest blog post for someone else’s blog, and we thought you might want to hear a different person’s perspective on living up North, so now we’re linking to this other blog post on our blog.
Category: Living up North
#NorthernProblems
Written by: Faye
“My eReader stopped working. Apparently the ink in the screen freezes at -30°C.”
We decided that we need a hashtag for situations like this. Here’s another one:
Our work truck doesn’t work very well below -15°C, so we were planning to replace it with one from another northern park. But, someone accidentally left a window down and some food in the replacement truck last summer, so a bear got in and destroyed the interior of the truck. Now we don’t have a replacement truck.
Good news about travelling up North!
Written by: Faye
You can use Aeroplan points to travel up North! Not all the way to Tulita of course, but First Air is an Aeroplan partner and flies to destinations such as Norman Wells, Inuvik, and Fort Simpson. Which means that you can use 25,000 points to get between anywhere in Canada or the continental US and Norman Wells (flight rewards chart here), and then pay only $233 (each way) to do the short hop to Tulita.
The key detail is that you can’t book the flight on Aeroplan’s website. I tried doing this a while back and concluded that points-based flights were impossible, but I recently learned that you have to call Aeroplan to make the booking. There are limited seats available. I was chatting with a guy from Inuvik who flies on points to visit family in Newfoundland, and he said that he usually books 10 months in advance. I’m not sure if that’s standard for all the northern routes, but it’s definitely worth investigating.
If you wanted to redirect all this money you just saved on flights into making your trip up North more awesome, one option might be to fly up to Norman Wells on points, then do a canoe trip down the Keele River (which brings you from near the park back to Tulita), and then you can either fly or paddle back to Norman Wells and depart from there.
Read our earlier posts about Northern Airlines and Paddling Trips in the NWT.