One day Glenn and Chris, while drinking, thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to travel to northern Canada, to Yellowknife, together”. I texted Eliza, Glenn’s wife, and asked, “Are the guys serious about Yellowknife? Is it just a guys trip or can we go too?”
So here we are. Sitting under the northern lights as I type this. Glenn’s staring out the giant windows of living room and Chris and I just unbundled from bracing the cold for about 50 minutes watching the lights and maveuvering our camera around.
This is an adult road trip. It makes me giggle and so happy to have a road trip with others again. There are five of us: Glenn and Eliza, Chris and I and Erika (her equal half couldn’t make it due to work). We drove the 1, 185 kilometres on Saturday March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) from Grande Prairie, Alberta to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. We arrived at 11:30pm, in time to enjoy a few pints of green beer and pipe music at the Black Knight.
Here are images of Day 1, which was 12-hours of driving/16-hours travel and Day 2
The trip begins!
A thick fog covered Grande Prairie on March 17, the morning we left town. I snapped this photo of Chris and joked, “This looks like the north right? We’ll just show people that and say we went.”
Picking up our 5th wheel and most important wheel, Erika.
Adult Road Trip! Group complete. From left to right: Chris, Erika, Laura (me), Eliza, and Glenn.
We took a break to walk down the trail and see frozen Alexandra Falls. What I dubbed, “Booger falls”.
Glenn + Eliza have been married for 21-one years.
And they are so darn adorable together!
The distance between gas stations is so great during part of the journey, you need to have your own.
Erika is always stretching, dancing or just moving.
The bridge to get you from Fort Providence to the other side of Great Slave Lake, only to drive another 3-hours to Yellowknife.
We’re in Yellowknife! For our first day of exploration, we checked out the local museum and then tried our hands at flying the kites for kite skiing.
We drove out onto the ice road, literally a stretch of Great Slave Lake, that has been plowed, so vehicles can drive around.
Erika brought her cross country skis.
Glenn teaches Chris how to fly and manuvior the kite.
Eliza watches.
Darwin and Summer, our wonderful, protective, companions who reside on a daily basis with Glenn, Eliza and their sons (who we left behind in Grande Prairie) Tristin and Jesper.
This is a “fat bike”, which means winter can’t stop you from enjoying a bike ride! Glenn and Eliza own 4 of them, so along with many other things, we brought them up in the Uhaul trailer we rented. This is me riding. I’m very bundled to protect myself from the -25 degree weather.
We ended Day 2 with watching and taking photos of Aurora Borealis or the northern lights. Yellowknife is an international hot spot for travellers from around the globe, to witness this natural phenomenon.
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