Northwest Territories Trip

If you haven't already seen it, keep going down this page and see a lot of pictures from our trip to the Northwest Territories. This entry will provide a brief text update of the trip. For those of you on a email update list, you can expect a nice newsletter to come by the end of this week. If you are reading this and are not on that list, please feel free to comment on this blog or send me an email and I"ll add you to the mailing list.

jraffini@hotmail.com

Saturday May 26th
We departed Okotoks around 830am to head north towards our destination for the night of High Level, Alberta. High Level is about 12 hours north, but still in Alberta, as it's a pretty big province. To give you some perspective, Okotoks to High Level is about the same distance as it is from Anderson, SC to Philadelphia, PA. We stayed with the Wiebe family there. They are a great family that many people have stayed with before on the way north.

Sunday May 27th
We left early in the morning again and headed on our way again towards Fort Simpson. To give you a better idea of how far we went in two days Okotoks to Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories is the same distance from Anderson, SC to Portland, Maine! We stopped along the way several times becasue the scenery was so incredible. The pictures in the weblog show a lot of what we saw. We stopped at the Alberta/Northwest Territories border and made a few good pictures, especially me with the Tiger Rag. Best picture of the trip if I do say so myself. We also stopped at several waterfalls along the route. The small native community of Kakisa that I spoke of in my email update was also a stop. Kakisa has 52 people in it and although there was very little activiity in town on this particular Sunday, I was struck by the immense challenge of trying to reach the people in this town with the gospel. I want to challenge everyone who reads this to think about how ministering in such a isolated community would be possible. How can we do it? How could you do it?
One of the more interesting portions of this part of the trip was the 250 miles on a dirt road. It was raining part of the way, so the dirt road was more like mud. It turned our white car a very dark shade of brown (see picture) We also crossed the ferry just before going into Fort Simpson, which was lots of fun and a little bit scary as we drove down a dirt embankment towards the river and ferry. We did make it safely across and eventually into Fort Simpson. We set up camp and got ready to go out into town and make some phone calls and look around. Monday was going to be busy.

Monday May 28th.

We met with Dan, a fairly new believer that our Current team led to the Lord and baptized three years ago. He helped up find the people we needed to find. We met with Betty Ann about housing and where our team could stay and got some really positive things done with that. We also spent time looking around town and got to do some other prep work for the team that will be there for the summer. We got so much done, we decided to go ahead and leave Monday afternoon. A quick but effective trip to Fort Simpson. We went back to High Level and stayed the night.

Tuesday May 29th

We drove most of the day to Edmonton and checked into our hotel. We then spent part of our evening at North America's largest shopping mall, the West Edmonton Mall. Lots of fun and we found out they were shooting a Christmas movie in the mall. We watched and had a great time with that.

Wednesday May 30th

Spent almost all day at the mall, mostly watching them film the movie. We saw Patrick Swayze and Chris Kataan shooting scenes. It was pretty great. We then checked into our hotel for the night. Long day at the mall, but we still didn't see or do everything in this huge mall.

Thursday May 31st

Back to Okotoks and that was our trip. I would highly reccomend making this trip. It was lots of fun and beautiful. Look for further updates to come!