July 16th
It’s been a while. So many stops before there were any starts. A month away from a voyage between Easter Island and Tahiti, the world was put on hold. We’ve always had our eyes on the Arctic, so when things started to open, we booked a trip to Western Greenland and the Canadian High Arctic.
But then, Canada still had second thoughts about letting the entire world back inside its borders, so that trip got modified to be Iceland and Eastern Greenland.
But then, Lindblad discovered that the ice sheets of Greenland had retreated so far north in the summer that a ship couldn’t reach them in the time allotted for the trip, so the itinerary shifted again to be an in-depth exploration of coastal Iceland.
But then, three days before that scheduled departure, with the emergence of new Covid variants, the trip was cancelled entirely. Instead, we booked a trip for the Summer of 2022 to the Russian Arctic, including stops in Murmansk, various recently opened archipelagos and culminating with a stop in Franz Josef Land, within about 550 miles of the North Pole.
But then, our friend Vladimir got bored and invaded Ukraine and suddenly no one was going anywhere near Russia.
But then, to deal with the mess, Lindblad added an additional itinerary through the Northwest Passage, starting in Greenland and ending in Nome, Alaska and they gave all of us displaced, long-suffering passengers first option before opening bookings up to all comers.
This is a trip I’ve always wanted to take and should be a nice bookend to our Antarctica trip a few years back. The other good piece of news is that every time a trip was canceled, Lindblad gave us credits bonuses and discounts for the next one. By the time we’ve gotten to this trip it’s added up pretty significantly and made a painfully expensive trip slightly less so.
So, Monday we take a charter flight from Providence to Greenland. After 21 nights on board, and hopefully after numerous encounters with polar bears, belugas, narwhals, walruses, musk oxen and so on, we’ll arrive in Nome.
As long as our flight to Boston gets us there on time.