Last day in Churchill

Today we slept in a little bit and then packed our suitcases so that we could put them out for transfer to the airport since we will head back to Winnipeg this afternoon.

Before breakfast we noticed that there was a sunrise and we went out to take a few photos on the main street.

Sign near the hotel warning you to stay alert becasue of Polar Bears

Some portion of the group headed off for a helicopter tour of the Tundra but we decided that we didn't need to do that. The rest of us headed out to Cape Merry - a park outtside of town overlooking the Hudson Bay and Fort Churchill. It was cold and windy and the bear guards had to go out on the rocks overlooking the beach to watch for bears so that we could safely explore the park. One of the guards was Kevin - the husband of the artist Sandra who we had gone to hear talk earlier in our visit. We walked out on the Rocks, out to the fort and heard a ranger talk about the history of the fort. We also saw the red adirondack chairs that we've seen at so many other Canada parks that we've visited so we had our pictures taken there.

After Cape Merry we headed back to the hotel to have lunch and wait for the other half of our group. Lunch was tasty and we had a few minutes to take some more pictures in town and visit some gift shops. We took a picture of the mural that Sandra had painted on the Hardware Store. We also head from someone at the hotel that there was an arctic hare in town and we want to look for it and found it sitting under a bus nearby

Once everyone in the group returned and had eaten lunch we headed for the airport and our last ride with Bob. We did take a short stop at "Polar Bear Jail" The bears will sometimes come into town while they are waiting for the Hudson Bay to freeze. The bear guards will try to scare them away with noisy cracker shells, beanbags etc.. but if they won't leave they are tranquilized and put into a building with cinder block cells until the ice is frozen and then they are released out on the beach and they had out on the ice. The first year they fed the bears in the jail even though the bears in the wild weren't eating because the ice wasn't ready yet. The second year when they opened the jail, the bears from the prior year were waiting outside. They no longer feed the bears in jail. We stopped to see the jail and the bear traps.

We headed back to the airport in Churchill to wait for our charter plane. We took the 2.5 hour flight back to Winnipeg and a short bus ride back to the Fort Garry hotel where we had stayed before. On the way back they gave us our new room keys and a departure time for the airport in the morning based on our flights home. We returned our parkas in the airport but had to return our boots at the hotel back in Winnipeg. The trip and the group that we used Nat Hab was so well organized. They had each person with transportation aligned to their flights but if you wanted to choose a different time, you could just call a number and they would move it. They had already arranged late check out for anyone who was leaving late. It worked so well. We returned out boots and went to a little market nearby to get some muffins for the morning since we were leaving before the restaurant opened. We then went down to the Opal Room restaurant in the hotel to have a glass of wine before our farewell dinner. We saw our friend Pauline the dining room manager and she made sure that someone took care of us. We then went to farewell dinner to say goodbye to the group and to Garrett our guide. We had an early transfer to the airport in the morning, and an uneventful trip from Winnipeg to Toronto and to Philadelphia. We really enjoyed the trip and would definitely use Nat Hab again.