Cameron's Dream Vacations - The Beginning

Today, during my semi-weekly trip to the bookstore to wander around and bemoan my lack of funds and/or time for books (during which I usually come away with a book or two anyway, and tonight was no exception), I lingered in the travel section. It was a bad idea- now I am super sad about not being able to travel the world according to my every whim. So I'm going to start a series of places I want to go... and you guys can help me decide where to go! See, my mom and dad, for my graduation present, gave me a bunch of frequent flier miles. I don't know how many, exactly, and I can't go anywhere yet anyway because I don't have the money to live on once I get there. But... I can dream, right?

So let's start with the completely obscure and ridiculous:

Baffin Island


Random place to want to go, right? Why would I want to visit a giant frozen chunk of the Canadian wilderness? Well, there are many reasons:

1) The aforementioned Canadian wilderness. I am a sucker for wilderness of all sorts- I've often said that you could drop me in the wilderness for a week with nothing but food and 50 rolls of film and I would be happy as a clam. Just a large expanse of nothingness and quiet all around you, dirt and stars and trees and not much else... you can't get much better than that. It might get a little cold at night though.



2) The elusive, majestic narwhal. The unicorn of the seas! I've wanted to see a narwhal ever since I first heard about them long ago- I can't even remember when it was. In case you are not blessed with knowledge of this species, I shall describe: narwhals are whale-like animals that have giant unicorn tusks that are ridiculously long- six or seven feet, from the pictures I've seen:



A narwhal's tusk is actually a gigantic front tooth- I think it's usually the left one. Weird, huh? So incredibly weird that I will not die happy until I see one for myself. There are, on occasion, two-tusked narwhals, but they're rare. Narwhal tusks were used back in the day to convince people that unicorns existed. Anyway, I would imagine one could go narwhal-watching on Baffin Island the way one goes whale watching in California. Maybe you could even see two narwhals fighting! Pretty rad, huh?

3) Polar bears. Polar bears are always cute. I think even if a polar bear were killing someone, it would still be kind of cute.

4) The Northern Lights. Sure, there are a million places I could see the Northern Lights- hell, I even sort of saw them once in Evanston, thanks to Jack and a well-timed "go look at the sky!" phone call. But I would really like to see them in all their glory at least once, and hey, why not doing it while I'm looking for narwhals in the Baffin Island wilderness? Check a few things off my list at once.

Have any of you ever been to Baffin Island or thereabouts? Any advice? I doubt I'll get there anytime soon, but you never know...

Thus concludes the first installment of Cameron's Dream Vacations- it fulfills the previously unattended-to "wanderlust" part of this blog (I bet going to Cinegear tomorrow will fill in the "cameras" part soon enough). Stay tuned- as the summer in LA only gets hotter and hotter and I get more and more depressed with my post-graduate-school life, there will be many more daydreams about far-off places and forays into the travel section of the bookstore. Promise.