Tag Archives: Canada

Under the Northern Lights

I posted a while back about the summer fishing/camping trip to the “secret” middle-of-the-wilderness lake my buddy “Scott” (we’ll call him) and I took each year — along with anyone we could talk into joining us. It was our annual pilgrimage for almost two decades.

Three times during that era we vacationed somewhere else: a cabin on Lake Kabetogama (where I caught zero fish); a houseboat on Lake Vermilion (loved sleeping on the water); and that time on the Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan.

We were so far north we were under the Northern Lights.

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Ronning’s Lake Carvings

It started in January with a local PBS show. I was trying to figure out a really good gift for a really good friend with a birthday in March. I often feel I’m a poor gift giver. It’s not a lack of generosity but that I forget to allow the time necessary for proper gift selection. I find I need that time to find something that both appeals to me and (more importantly) is a great fit for the recipient.

Part of my gift giving philosophy is that the gift should be something I’d almost rather keep than give away. I figure if it appeals to me, it should appeal to my (generally like-minded) friends. I’m not sure that logic always follows, but c’est la vie.

Anyway, I was watching PBS…

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Canadian Camping 1996

Walleye: It’s what’s for dinner!

Well, that’s a surprise. My Ideas folder has a document I thought was a description of my first Canadian camping trip with my buddy (let’s call him) “Scott”. I’ve been meaning to post it one of these days. Having just told a story about my dog Sam, I thought maybe it was time to post some of the other memories stories.

The surprise is that the document is about a trip in 1996, the 10th (or so) annual pilgrimage we’d made. That first time we didn’t really know what we were doing and both under- and over-prepared. That was of a vacation with a lot of pain, but which engendered fondness in retrospect.

Enough fondness that we did it annually for over 15 years.

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