Iqaluit is a surprisingly popular destination in late June. I watched the lineup form at the far end of the airport, then the last few missing passengers hurried to join it when boarding started.
One guy didn’t end up flying home on Canada North today. Four police officers patiently explained over and over again that he was too intoxicated to fly. “You’re not, like, going into cardiac arrest or anything, right? Oh, good. But I’m sorry, no flying today. You were sleeping on the floor! One or two beers is one story, but this is…”
I saw the guy having a few smokes and half a bottle of vodka earlier with a couple of friends who were now boarding. “First time on land in months!” he claimed. “I’m celebrating, and I’m going home!”
He must have been working on a boat. Or maybe on the moon, for all I know. He had “made a lot of money.” He had had too much to drink.
I actually felt sorry for him. He sat there, defeated, until one of the officers brought in a wheelchair and took him somewhere safe to sober up.
“Tomorrow. You’ll fly home tomorrow. Just… no drinking tonight, alright?”
Flying to Iqaluit is actually on my bucket list because I’ve been translating for the Government of Nunavut for close to ten years, and I’ve learned enough about the territory by now that Nunavummiut feel like friends I have yet to meet. But plane ticket prices are insane—way too expensive for a short visit—and I don’t have it in me to live where it’s cold, for real, even by Canadian standards.
In another life, maybe.
Yet, I couldn’t help staring at the passengers boarding. Iqaluit isn’t a tourist destination. It’s home, or a commitment. And based on what I saw, it’s a lot more diverse than you’d think. There were two Black families, a group of Indian passengers originally from Calcutta, and a Muslim family. Huh. Interesting.
But no Iqaluit for us. It’s just “the same boring trip” to France.
For many families too. Half of the plane was middle-aged Canadian couples off to see Paris “without the kids!”, and the other half was more kids than already exhausted parents, with one foot in the New World and the other in Europe.
Many other passengers were only spending a couple of hours in Paris before connecting onward to South Asia and beyond—the first of several flights to the other side of the world.
Surprisingly, Mark still held my hand at takeoff. He’s morphed into a teen I can barely recognize, but he’s still my kid, the one who used to shout “more planes!” when we were not traveling often enough to his liking.
It doesn’t take that long to fly across the Atlantic from this part of Canada to France, so we were all half-asleep when we landed in Paris at 6:10 a.m., midnight in Ottawa. Fortunately, everything went smoothly and required minimal thinking—immigration, luggage, and the next thing you know, Mark and I were looking for a quiet spot to hang out for a few hours before the 9:40 a.m. train to Nantes.
The waiting part is the hardest. It’s boring and by then, we’re really sleepy because it’s sleeping time in Canada.
Mark and I took turns getting drinks, coffee, water, and walking outside.
I was planning to crash on the train, but all the passengers were chatty and social. The group of four in front of me was coming from the US—a French dad, half-French and half-American teens. Across from them, a disparate group had come from Taiwan and Finland, so they traded cultural stories and compared prices.
One of the guys managed to trot out platitudes for three and a half hours. He started with “back in my day, young people worked hard to buy a house and start a family” at 9:55 a.m., then advised the teen returning from Taiwan to “drop off a résumé, keep calling employers, and offer to work for free to get experience.” At 10:15 a.m., he went on a tirade about the “good old days of the Cold War, when we knew who the enemies were”—not the one you think; he was a proud Communist—and around 11 a.m., he spent twenty minutes describing the US to the American family, “that place where people drive big cars and don’t know how to live in a society.”
He was actually quite entertaining, in a way, but I couldn’t sleep.
Which is probably why I crashed at 7 p.m. for a one-hour nap once in Nantes.
I know I was there just two months ago, but it’s good to be back, especially just as summer is starting. Summertime is fun in France.
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