Day 4 - Again Canada Day

I awoke at 5 am to the sound of rain.  I knew that precipitation, and possibly thunderstorms, had been forecast for the afternoon, but I wasn't expecting rain in the morning.  I turned over and dozed for another three hours.

By the time we'd dressed and eaten, the sun was out.  We walked to Main Street where the Whitehorse Canada Day parade was forming between 4th and 6th Avenues.  It looked a little like the Transport Festival in our own town of Sandbach, in that there weren't actually that many people there, and the procession didn't look that grandiose.  But appearances aren't everything; enthusiasm counts for an awful lot in these remote parts of Canada.

We also tracked down the bagpipe-playing culprits I'd heard yesterday: while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police practised a few drills in the street, the Midnight Sun Pipe Band were warming up their bladders, chanters and drones.  What the First Nation peoples must have thought when they first heard that caterwauling I cannot imagine.

We wandered down to a suitable location on 2nd Avenue ready for the start of the parade.  I waited for local law enforcement to block off the roads, erect barriers, do something, but all they did was turn all the traffic lights to red.  It was all they needed to do.

At 11 am the strangled-cat wail of bagpipes filled the air, and the parade got underway.  The sun was shining, the Maple Leaf flags were waving, the crowds were cheering and clapping.  In Trafalgar Square, London, there were 80,000 Canadians celebrating their own Canada Day, while in Whitehorse, YT there were 23,000 Canadians and 2 English people.  I'm not even sure all the 23,000 Canadians were there.

Such a variety of groups in the parade, including the aforementioned Pipe Band, the RCMP, Scouts Canada, the Yukon China Community Association, the Whitehorse Fire Department, and the Yukon Order of Pioneers, to name but a few.  A disparate bunch of people, but all making up one diverse and functioning community.  With the red and white Canadian flag being waved so enthusiastically, with the cheers and the applause, it wasn't long before that now familiar Canada Day lump came into my throat.

The parade was soon over, and we followed the group down to Shipyards Park at the north-eastern end of the town.  There we joined a short queue and received a slice of a huge Canada Day birthday cake, before gathering in front of a stage to hear the Commissioner of Yukon, the Honourable Doug Phillips, officially open the celebrations.  The Maple Leaf was raised, lowered, untangled, and raised again, then O Canada duly sung to the accompaniment of a second lump in the throat and moist eyes.  At that point we left them to it: it's their day, not ours, and though we love to share it with them, sometimes I feel we just need to let the Canadians be Canadians for a while.  I admire them for their patriotic pride, it's the same sort of pride we felt in Great Britain during the 2012 Olympics, and you can't really be a part of it, it feels like you're intruding.

We walked around Shipyards Park taking in the other Canada Day amusements, which were mostly food stalls and a volleyball tournament.  The sky to the west darkened, then darkened some more, and, while we were walking along a path by the Yukon River, it started raining quite heavily.  We headed across the park and over the road to a Dead Timmy's, where we had a drink and shared a chocolate donut.  The rain soon ended, but the sky remained overcast for the rest of the day.

Heading back over to the park, we caught the Whitehorse Trolley for something to do.  This is a small electric train which runs back and forth on a single track alongside the river.  I found myself separated from Sandra, and ended up talking to the train's conductor.  Her first good deed was to tell me that, as it was Canada Day, the $4 per person fare was waived, and her second good deed was to give me, in 15 minutes, more raw data about the area than I'd gleaned from books and teh_internets in 6 months of research.

My head crammed with new information, we dropped off the train and headed back to Shipyards Park where we ate an allegedly Filipino dish of rice (cold) with meat on a stick (cold) and a spring roll (luke warm) with stuff in it.  It wasn't as good as the chocolate donut.  Afterwards we made our way back over to the stage where an enthusiastic band were pumping out live music while a girl danced with flames, ribbons and hoops (not all at the same time).  We watched a few more acts and then decided to head back to the hotel, with a couple of more stops planned on the way.

First we dropped in at the Yukon Visitor Information Centre, where I picked up some more maps and pamphlets about places we have yet to visit, and gleaned even more information from the helpful staff about parts of our journey of which I had known little.  Combined with the knowledge gained from the conductor on the Whitehorse Trolley, I've learned much more about the places we will be visiting over the next couple of weeks, and the dodgy roads between them.  It was nice to have confirmation that I was right to be worried (but not too worried) about some parts of this holiday, and not worried at all about other parts of it.

Second, we booked ourselves in at the Frantic Follies show at the Westmark Whitehorse Hotel, one of the shows I'd always planned for us to see.  It mentions "audience participation"... surely they won't pick on Sandra?

Tonight we ate at our hotel, and I have to say my duck main course was one of the three best meals I've eaten in Canada (another of those three being our meal at Truffle Pigs Bistro in Field, BC, and the third being one I have yet to eat).  I was pleasantly surprised to find food of such high calibre in our frankly ordinary-looking hotel.

And so Canada's 146th birthday draws to a close.  It's 11 pm as I write this, and not even close to getting dark outside, that's how far north we are.  A long day, and a full and interesting day.  It bodes well for the rest of the holiday.

Tomorrow, well, we're on the look out for the longest fish ladder in the world, and if that doesn't sound interesting I don't know what does.