Leave home and continent

  Glasgow, United Kingdom
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

This was the day we were flying to Canada. I wasn't particularly looking forward to it, I had never flown for more than an hour and a half before, and I am not a great flyer anyway; I don't find the idea of being in the sky for long periods of time very appealing. So nine hours was going to be new to me. I was with the Lothian School's Strathspey and Reel Society- a fiddle orchestra- and we were about to begin our orchestra's 25th anniversary tour of the second biggest country in the world- although, only a little bit of it. The flight was from Glasgow International Airport, and we ended up having to wait there for about four hours before the flight- lots of card games and cups of coffee! There was a Cafe Nero there which was a relief, and to save a bit of money I made one coffee go a long way by constantly filling it up with milk. However, the wait wasn't all bad. I had just bought a new camera, a beautiful Fuji Finepix S900 digital SLR, and so I had plenty of time to try it out. I tried not to be hurt by my friends calling it a "beast of a camera", and I did get a few great pictures during the long hours, one of my double bassist friend Timmy-

Timmy

Great photo! :)
And then, coincidently, I met my friend Jan, who was off to Lanzarote for sun, sea and sand. And drink. Not my type of holiday! We were going to the west of Canada, flying to Calgary city and from there, exploring the sights. The itinerary looked great. Obviously, being a tour, we had no say in the developing of it, but our leader Yla had lined up some amazing things for us. The trip was going to last two weeks, a bit short for me, but it would show us a glimpse of the amazing country.
Although I wasn't too excited about the flight, the flightpath was sure to be amazing. As it is much quicker and shorter to fly over the earth rather than around it, we were going to fly north across Iceland and Greenland, before crossing Hudson Bay into Canada. This also limits the amount of time flying across open ocean, so if something were to go wrong we wouldn't need to find a floating runway to land on. Once we had finally taken off and had been flying for a few hours, our wait was rewarded with spectacular views across Greenland, and I think we annoyed the other passengers as we leant across the seats to constantly take photographs.

Lake

There were some amazing mountains as we first crossed into Greenland, I don't know what the range is called, but some of the mountains in the south of the island are pretty high! We could see hundreds of lakes and rivers, and several glaciers too, all very far below. Sadly, I have read that the glaciers in Greenland are receding at a rate twice as fast as they were just 5 years ago, and if we allow global warming to continue then these amazing ice flows will disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. However, saying this, doing things like flying to Canada isn't helping much. I think the glacier I photographed may be the Jacobshavn Glacier on the West coast, but I may be completely wrong.

earth curve

This last photograph is my favourite, it is the view back across the island as we head across the Davis Strait towards Baffin Island. I like to think that is the curve of the earth, although its probably not. Not at our altitude anyway.