Further Delights from Underrated April

It really could have been we were just out of town a lot earlier or a lot later than everyone else tonight, and were much further out of town too, but, where did everyone go?
The Ingraham Trail felt like a ghost highway of a hundred years ago. No, really, the frost heaves are horrendous. But it just seemed like there was no one else around anywhere tonight, and I loved every single millisecond of that.

Steep Contrasts

My new found joy in an old fashioned mercury thermometer cannot be overstated, and last night it had us at -31 standing out on a frozen lake at the end of the night. Meanwhile my parents are probably out playing pickleball in shorts and t-shirts while my brother kayaks rivers and lakes in the south.
For Morgan and I, there will be plenty of time for the latter this summer, but for now I’m still loving these last weeks driving out of town during twilight chasing the aurora into the countryside.

The Best Gas Station View

So there I am standing at the front of my car while she fills with gas, watching out to the darkening eastern sky and swirls of the aurora are playing around low on the horizon. It’s barely dark enough to see her, but already she’s there, and you just knew it was going to be a perfect night ahead.

Definitely Unexpected

Aurora conditions were quiet. Like, first photo kind of quiet where the Milky Way was more prominent in the sky than the aurora. But stepping out of the car some 50 kilometres from Yellowknife and seeing the sky completely littered with stars, almost as littered as our oceans are with our trash, it almost felt like the aurora, if she would join us at all, was just going to be an organic, locally grown cherry on top.
And I’ll admit it right away, much to my surprise tonight, the aurora did join us, and several hours in, was absolutely spectacular.

Icelandic Nostalgia

Heavy snow flurries swirled in the sky out our living room window before turning to rain pounding against the corrugated steel siding of our home in winds gusting 50km/h not a half hour later. The highways were covered in fresh snow. The car being hounded by the wind as we drove. The clouds blew in and out faster than we could ever outrun them. And the temperature just hovered around zero. This is everything I love so much about Iceland, and tonight it was everything I loved so much about a fairly stressful few hours.