Change In Plans

This short post is about taking the kids to see a pediatric dentist in Nashville.

As we get ready to embark on the third, and longest, leg of our family trip, India had the good sense to schedule dental appointments for Zola and Tallulah. We found ourselves at an incredibly busy and well managed practice about three miles from India’s parents’ house.

The practice has about six administrators and at least ten hygienists/assistants, supporting three calm but busy doctors. The practice is designed to be entertaining and fun for kids. The waiting room has old-school arcade video games (with volumes turned way down), and a climbing/tunnel area. The treatment area itself has sports pictures and gear hanging up everywhere, and lots of windows. Above each treatment chair there is a TV screen built into the ceiling, tuned to the Disney Channel. Every kid gets a swag bag when they finish: toothbrushes and toothpaste and a mug and comics and games and stuff. Any kid who has more than an exam and tooth cleaning goes to claim a toy from a stack of prizes. Once a year, the practice hosts a free all-day picnic for its patients at a local amusement park. Every kid we saw seemed genuinely happy to be at the dentist’s office. Amazing. Maybe all suburban dentist offices are like this, and I am just easily impressed.

Unfortunately for us, Zola had to have a rotten baby tooth “wiggled out,” which wasn’t pleasant. They gave him laughing gas (although he didn’t seem affected by it very much), and pulled it. We agreed with Dr. Taylor that this was better than waiting for it to fall out on its own, and risking an abcess while we are in India or Nepal or somewhere. Zola is now nursing a wad of bloody gauze, and wondering if the tooth fairy will bring him Pokemon cards.

More unfortunately, little Tallulah needs some extensive work done on her baby molars. She was not blessed with thick enamel on her baby teeth: let’s hope the adult teeth are better. Apparently the best approach is to do this under general anesthesia in a surgical center.

We discussed several options with Dr. Taylor, who I think was both intrigued and slightly horrified by us. One option was to wait until we are in South Africa or Australia, and to find a good dentist there. Another option was to try and have the surgery done in Nashville before we leave for Japan (or delay our departure until we can have it done). “Do nothing” is apparently not an option.

In the end, Dr. Taylor cancelled his Wednesday-morning golf game (really), and will do the procedure tomorrow. Watching your child go under general anesthesia is an awful thing for a parent to experience, but this is the least painful, least stressful, and fastest way to solve the problem. Fewer sweets and more brushing are in both kids’ futures.

Capping off an afternoon of relatively unpleasant surprises, the “COBRA” dental insurance that we arranged when I left my job has somehow not gone into effect. We were fortunate to be able to pay cash and sort it out later, but I can at least imagine the stress of the financial tradeoffs for uninsured parents. Scary stuff. Having good health insurance is a great job benefit.

So, we will have more drama in our Nashville visit than we were hoping, but it will be good to have the kids’ dentistry sorted out.

Our original flight back to Winnipeg was cancelled, then just delayed by several hours, so we managed to Fletch our way onto a charter flight that was leaving on time. With minimal drama (relatively speaking - we were still on an ancient turboprop, taking off in lousy weather) we departed from Churchill and flew down south.

After four days in Churchill, Winnipeg seemed balmy and cosmopolitan. We actually sat and soaked up the afternoon sun for 20 minutes after we arrived.

Later that evening, because we were five passengers, and the taxi driver refused to bend the “four passenger rule” for us, we had to figure out another way to get from our hotel to a restaurant. Creating what will probably be Zola’s and Charlsi’s most abiding memory of the whole polar bear trip, we took a white stretch limousine to the restaurant (less expensive than two cabs). It was funny to me that the limo created more giddy, gee-whiz excitement in the two kids than the Tundra Buggy, or the second polar-bear sighting, or the turboprop plane. I’ve given up trying to predict what will get Zola excited. He was happy, we were happy.

Rae & Jerry’s, where we went for dinner, is a perfectly preserved, circa 1957 , retro fine dining steak house. It is a Winnipeg institution: red velvet, bucket seats in the cocktail lounge, dark wood paneling. We had a good dinner, celebrated our ploar bear adventure, called Amit the limo driver to take us back to the hotel, and got everyone to bed.

We were out of the hotel by about 6:15 this morning, through check-in and U.S. customs and passport control on the Winnipeg side by 7:30, and airborne at 8:30. We changed planes again in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and were back in Nashville just before noon. Aside from the woman in the seat in front of Zola complaining repeatedly to the flight attendant that he was kicking her (we eventually switched his seat), the flights were uneventful.

The polar bear trip was cool. We have a lot to think about and talk about over the next few days as we process the experience. Churchill is not quite ready for prime time as a tourist destination, but we had a great time, and we sure saw a lot of polar bears.

Tundra Buggies are purpose-built vehicles for exploring the marshy tundra terrain around Churchill, looking for polar bears. Because water doesn’t drain well through the permafrost, the flat landscape is dotted with large, shallow (2-3 feet deep) lakes. Each buggy is a cross between a diesel-powered monster truck (five-foot high tires and a heavy duty chassis) an old municipal bus (a 30-foot long, big-windowed white box, all riveted together), and an amphibious landing vehicle. Each Tundra Buggy also has an open-air viewing deck on the back. It is ideally suited for driving on the rough roads and through the shallow icy lakes around Churchill. The theoretical maximum speed of a Tundra Buggy is 25 miles per hour, but we spent most of our time crawling along (bumpily) at about 10 mph.

Our Tundra Buggy driver and guide, Marc, is a Churchill classic. He is a French Canadian, and works as a river guide in the Yukon during the summer, and as a dog-sled guide in the Canadian Rockies during the winter. The six-week bear season in Churchill fits in perfectly, so he has been driving a Tundra Buggy for the last ten years. Mark is very handsome, friendly and competent, and was particularly sweet to Zola and Charlsi. India conveyed her general approval by telling me “Marc must get a lot of babes during bear season.”

We drove around in the Tundra Buggy from about 8:30am to 5pm, which is a lot of time in a Tundra Buggy. Fortunately, within the first hour we saw a mother bear and her two-year old cub. Obligingly they came right up to the vehicle, sniffed the tires, and were very photogenic and accommodating.

After looking at the first pair for nearly an hour, we drove around and looked at other bears, sleeping, trotting along, drinking water. Marc told us that this is a “waiting time,” and that the bears don’t want to expend a lot of energy until they can start hunting. That didn’t matter, they were awesome to look at (very picturesque against the brown vegetation and black water of the glacial lakes and the Hudson Bay).

When we switched off the diesel engines, and I could stand on the back deck in the cool wind, smelling the water and watching the bears do their thing, it was just great.

All in we saw eleven bears today, although it seems a little too special to keep track just by quantifying the sightings. We also saw (and tracked) an Arctic fox, and many, many ptarmigans. Ptarmigans, I found out, are medium-sized white ground birds, which are at the bottom of the food chain for every predator in the Arctic. As we rolled slowly across the tundra, Marc explained a lot about the ecosystem and its animals, and he regaled us with tales of the north country.

It was a wonderful day.

This short post is about our first day off the grid in Churchill, Manitoba.

Technically, Churchill is “at the end of the grid” instead of “off the grid.” The Canadian power system runs as far north as here, and then stops. Roads, on the other hand, stop about 200 miles south of Churchill, so the only ways to get here are by rail or air. There is no cell-phone service. It is as isolated in reality, about 600 miles north of Winnipeg (as the crow flies, about 1,100 miles on the train), as it looked on the Planet Earth video.

We met up with our tour group at 6:45 this morning, waited and moved around Winnipeg airport for an hour, and were airborne in a charter plane by about 8:00. While we were at the airoprt, the kids and I had the quintessential Canadian experience of Tim Horton’s “TimBits” for breakfast. They are like Dunkin Munchkins, but with a lot more cultural significance (I gather).

The plane was an ancient (early 1970s) turboprop, which did not reassure India, the nervous flier. The windows frosted over immediately upon takeoff, so we couldn’t see the terrain beneath us. We flew for just over two hours, and landed in Churchill in a snow flurry a little after 10am. It is not particularly cold (just above freezing), but you get a real sense of the tundra.

We are somehow affiliated with a tour group, so we started our adventure with a bus tour of the village of Churchill. Churchill has about 750 residents, so the tour was short: grocery store, Catholic Church, railroad tracks, Anglican Church, all-purpose community building, liquor store. Our guide promised to show us the grain silo tomorrow. We were instructed to check into out hotel and report for lunch at the Churchill Motel before noon. Our hotel is the Tundra Inn, which is comfortable but motel like. The shampoo in the showers comes in a little sachet. This is the nicest place in town.

We went for a nice walk down to the shore of Hudson Bay, and looked out at the black water.
I put my hands in, and affirmed that it is very cold. Difficult to tell how long it will be until it freezes, but until then there are a lot of polar bears waiting around near Churchill.

After sitting with the tour group for a pre-packaged soup and sandwich lunch, we decided to take our experience into our own hands.

We had originally been scheduled to go dog sledding on Sunday, but India persuaded the nice people at BlueSkyMush to move us up to this afternoon. There is no snow, so the dogs were hitched to a home-made cart instead. Gerald, the owner and sled driver, said he built the cart about 5 years ago, as the freeze and the snow got consistently later.

Zola and Charlsi had a great time playing with the dogs, and Zola got to drive the sled/cart with Gerald. India, LC, and I rode in the cart and admired the dogs as they bounded along in the mud and slush. The conventional wisdom is that sled dogs are happiest when they are pulling a sled; this appeared to be true with our dogs.

Overall, it was a terrific afternoon in the weak Northern Manitoban sun. Gerald and his wife, Jennifer, were gracious hosts and good company, and they are great ambassadors for Churchill.

Tomorrow morning we get up very early, and spend the day riding around in a tundra vehicle, looking for polar bears. Many of the other visitors we have spoken to saw polar bears on their game drives, so we are optimistic.

This far, Churchill has been interesting.

This short post is about our afternoon and evening in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

We arrived in Winnipeg at about 4pm, and discovered immediately that Canadian border control is tougher than that of any of the other eight countries we have visited thus far on our trip.

We should have guessed there would be challenges when a group of elderly wheelchair-bound passengers was directed by the NorthWest Airlines crew to move to the front of the passport control line. The officers chastised the group loudly, and sent them to wait at the very back.

“But sir, we were only doing what the flight crew …” said one of the passengers.

One of the flak-jacketed customs officers interrupted the passenger loudly, “Flight crews have no authority over our operations. We will process you after we have completed everyone else in the line.”

Harsh. I thought Canadians were supposed to be friendly.

The woman directly in front of us was getting grilled by the other officer. Apparently the passenger was giving a motivational speech to a church group, and hadn’t declared the commercial goods (books and CDs) that she had brought to sell at the church. She was sequestered to a closed room on the side to be dealt with by superior officers.

Then it was our turn. Zola, India and I got through fine. India’s gentlemanly 72-year-old father, LC, and his 9-year-old granddaughter, our niece Charlsi Jayne, triggered all kinds of immigration alarms.

On the suspicion that LC was some kind of child-smuggling Humbert Humbert, the officers got very worked up. Several times they asked Charlsi, “Are you sure that he is your grandfather?” and “If the two of you are related, why do you live at separate addresses?”

LC and Charlsi were sent to the sequestration room, along with the book-smuggling motivational speaker. Eventually, some combination of us (including India and me) persuaded the commanding officer that we were legitimate, and that our failure to fax a notarized letter from Charlsi’s parents in advance was merely a mistake of ignorance. I offered to get Charlsi’s parents on the phone, but was reprimanded sharply for trying to take control of the process.

As we re-emerged into the baggage claim area, we saw the dozens of “missing child” posters and bulletins on the walls. Either Manitoba has a real problem, or the customs officers are hypervigilant on child smuggling, or both. Regardless, we were happy to get past customs and into the cold Canadian afternoon.

After we checked into our hotel, we went downtown to check out Winnipeg. Interestingly, all of the taxis here appear to be Priuses, and most appear to be driven by turban-clad Punjabis.

The driver dropped us at The Forks, a park and small South-Street-Seaport-type development near where the Red River and Assiniboine River meet. After looking around a little, we took a footbridge across the Assiniboine onto a river-front walking/biking path. Both areas were nearly deserted as late afternoon became dusk. We looked out at the flat and already freezing scenery for a short while, and watched long freight trains clatter off loudly to the south and to the west. We then headed back to The Forks to try looking in a new direction.

We walked across an elegant Red River bridge into Winnipeg’s French quarter, which had a lot of signs in French, but was also curiously devoid of foot traffic.

Freezing, we jumped into another Punjabi Prius taxi, and went to an elegant steakhouse called 529 Wellington, away from downtown but still on the Red River.

529 Wellington was a good choice. Despite the fact that we had no reservations, brought small kids, and were comically underdressed, they were very welcoming. Also, the food and the service were excellent. According to several of the sources I could check on my BlackBerry as we tried to choose a restaurant, it is considered Winnipeg’s best.

Our afternoon in Winnipeg was fine. Frankly, it is diffiult to imagine living here, particularly given a cold, windy and gray October afternoon. Early tomorrow we fly another ~800 miles north to Churchill. The cold, windy, and gray may be only beginning.

This short post is about leaving Nashville, and starting the long journey to Churchill, Manitoba.

We are headed up to Northern Canada for four days to watch the polar-bear migration. Every October, a huge group of polar bears congregate near Churchill to wait for the Arctic ice to get thick enough to walk on. When the ice is ready, they disperse northward onto their winter hunting grounds.

This trip was Zola’s suggestion, having watched a “Planet Earth” DVD over and over again which showed the migration. My recollection was that Churchill looked pretty cold and desolate in the video, even in mid-October. Many people have said that the migration pattern will likely change with global warming, so this may be a limited-time opportunity.

We are racing to get on an 11:20am flight from Nashville to Minneapolis-St. Paul (another airport where I spent a colossal amount of time in the last two years). We have a short layover, potentially involving an OJ-Simpson run through the big airport, then we fly to Winnipeg. We stay overnight, then board a charter for Churchill tomorrow morning.

To give a sense of the geography, Churchill is as far from the Canadian border to the North as Nashville is from the border to the South.

We have left Tallulah in Nashville with India’s mother. It was sad this morning when she realized that Zola, India and I were all leaving, and she was staying behind. India’s father, LC, and our 9-year-old niece, Charlsi, are coming with us. Zola is thrilled to have another older kid along. He has been talking non-stop (about Pokemon) since we got in the car.

This is a strange side trip in our travels, but should be fun. We are supposed to do a series of game drives, go dog sledding, see an Eskimo museum, experience Canadian culture. We brought along a travel Scrabble game just in case.

This very short post is about being back at Newark Airport, en route to Nashville. Prior to leaving my job in May, EWR had been a central part of my life for the previous several years.

We drove down out of the Beaverkill Valley at about 12:30pm. The trip to Newark was largely uneventful, except for the bad guidance given by the navigation system in my car. Having made that trip dozens of times before, I probably should have gone the way I know, but variety is the spice of life.

It is definitely strange to be at Newark Airport for the first time in several months. When I was still working, I flew out of and into this place with ridiculous frequency. Ironically, now that we are travelling full time, I haven’t been to (this) airport in a long while. It doesn’t appear to have changed much, but perhaps I have.

When I was working at McKinsey, and we were living in New Jersey, I could drive or take the train to most of my clients. I flew on average only about every other week.

When I left the Firm to take a corporate job, my office was first in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then in San Diego. Every Monday morning, week in and week out, I would kiss the sleeping family goodbye in a darkened house, drive the 45 minutes to Newark Airport, get on a plane, and be an absentee father and husband until Friday evening. On some special occasions I would leave a day later, or get back a day earlier.

This was no way to live, but somehow I talked myself into thinking it was OK (eg, “it’s only temporary”, “India and the kids are fine without me”, “I’m really not gone that much”, etc.)

Being at this airport brings back a flood of those memories, and makes me sad for what I have missed. Travelling this year as a family doesn’t make up for the years I was away, but it’s a start.