Our other road trip

We got home from our Inuvik trip on Sunday evening, while I was helping to reconfigure a plane the next afternoon, one of our captains came into the hangar and told me to pack for two or three days because we were leaving for Ontario in an hour and a half. No problem, I just went home and exchanged clean underwear and socks from the suitcase I didn't even get a chance to unpack yet! Of course we didn't actually come home for eight days. We spent that night in Winnipeg, and the next morning went to one of the Native communities that needed evacuating, which was why we were there. Just about the whole of northwestern Ontario was on fire and consequently blanketed in smoke. We evacuated people from North Spirit Lake, Keewaywin, Deer Lake and Sandy Lake, took them all to Geraldton, and then the smoke there also got really bad, so we took some people from there to Sudbury. We couldn't stay in Geraldton because there were no rooms available, so each night we flew to Thunder Bay. We never really knew what we would be doing from day to day, so we had to lug our suitcases around the whole time. Towards the end of that week we knew we would probably be staying long enough to take everyone back home again, we managed to get a short shopping trip in, and also stock up on supplies for the plane. On the one morning during breakfast we got a call that the RCMP wanted us to go and pick up a SWAT team, so we flew two and a half hours to Lake Simcoe Regional, couldn't find anyone when we got there and then found out that the "situation had been resolved" and they didn't need the team anymore, so we flew back again empty, a nice little sightseeing tour of Ontario for nothing! The people we had on the plane were mostly people with kids, or health problems that they wanted to get out of the smoke, so it made for some interesting flights, usually the kids outnumbered the adults. At one point we had 58 people on our 46 seater (perfectly legally!) because there were so many kids that were small enough to sit on laps. The first picture is to show you these traditional lace up things that they put the babies in, and any of them that were bundled up like that never made a sound. Then you can see some of the fires, we counted over thirty on one flight. Another morning we were on weather hold to take people home, so you can see all the planes that were there to do all the work. There was our Dash 7, Dash 8s from Regional One, Arctic Sunwest and Air Inuit, a Calm air Hawker 748, Beech 1900 from Wasaya, as well as all the water bombers sitting around. Lots of pilots per sqaure room on that day! It was also kind of weird being around the "real" flight attendants from Regional One and Calm Air, they were shocked to hear that me and the Arctic Sunwest girl have to groom our own planes, also that I get to wear sneakers instead of heels! Some day I might learn how to do my hair like that too!

Anyway, all in all it was a fun trip, even though we had to steam clean the interior of the plane when we got home.