Farther North than North

Looking south from farther north than North

Growing up in Minnesota, I came to think of the Lake of the Woods as waaay up there, the sticks, the boonies, a place where dog sleds and voyageurs still roamed. Imagine my surreal feeling at eating fish and chips tonight at a window overlooking that Utter North from yet further north.

My bed in a straw bale house at Room to Grow

Where I am- the Super 8 in Kenora, Ontario. In two days I've gone from sleeping in a hotel in a boom town, across miles of prairie, visiting the site of my earliest memories, crossing an international border, sleeping in the equivalent of an Irish thatched cottage, driving through miles and miles of canola (It smells like warm cauliflower), finding a friend of Minnesota friends on a back road of the Canadian prairie, driving through more miles and miles of canola, finding a place in the bush after three turns on unmarked gravel roads, crashing on a hippie couch, driving through glacial hills, across ordinary prairie, across flat-as-a-pancake prairie, through classic northern woods, past a huge meteor crater lake, into the oldest rock outcroppings on the planet among lakes and trees, to a place reminiscent of Grand Marais, but about five times as big.