Flin Flon July Long

I spent the long weekend in Flin Flon with friends.  I was both excited and anticipating adventure, and nervous and anxious, as I always am when I travel with other people for the first time.

I had a blast.

I don't think I stopped talking about Flin Flon for about the first 3 days back in Saskatoon.

When I got home I told everybody about how Flin Flon got its name.  Tom Creighton (Creighton, SK is adjacent to Flin Flon) found a book in the wilderness called The Sunless City.  The town was named after the main character of the book, Josiah Fintabbatey Flonatin.

Flin Flon is located on the Northern Shield and you can see the rocks everywhere.  The buildings are built on top and around rocks.  I even drove by one house that had built a bridge to walk from the street to the back door of the house.  The streets are hilly and curvy and really fun to drive on, I kept thinking how fun it would be to cordon off the streets and rally car around the city.  

The first thing you notice in Flin Flon the the tall tall stack, which, I found out is the tallest free standing structure in Western Canada, it stands at 825 feet (Calgary Tower stands at 626 feet).  It had closed down permanently about a week before I arrived.

One of the best surprises was The Orange Toad, a cute, trendy little coffee shop that is located downtown and also sells books.  The Trout Festival was on that day and we spent an afternoon watching live entertainment, walking around the main street and eating delicious Kettle Corn Popcorn.

We also fished.

I have to admit, I was a little nervous taking my son on a fishing trip.  The beauty of fishing is in its simplicity and requires patience and perseverance.  Fishing is where time can linger and you can fall back in love with the world around you.  Where you notice the cloudy sky and the wind kissing your face and where nature will meet you when you see glimpses of animals on the shoreline and the birds flying overhead.  Fishing is the excitement of getting that tug on your line and then your world instantly shifts into action.

Fishing is not playing COD and watching You Tube videos in a world that is not tangible, but rather digital.  I was worried that video games and the internet had ruined any appreciation my son would have of fishing and that he would be grumpy and rude and offend our gracious hosts.  The first day we went out, we came home with no fish, but it turns out he loved it!  So the next day, we arranged to go with the guys on some crazy adventure through the bush to get to a great fishing spot.

The trip in to get to the lake was epic, and definitely a great memory my son will have for a long time.  He and and Kent sat in the back trailer, which we called the coffin.  I was lucky to get a seat on the back of the quad and every joint wrenching bump we hit and every tree branch we dodged, I was thankful to be sitting behind one competent and crazy quad driver.  I definitely have a new appreciation for quads and the type of terrain that they can drive over.  Every now and then I would scream at my son to sit down, in fear that the coffin would tip over, but I did try to bite my tongue every now and then and let my boy be a man.

There is so much I could talk about, from the fantastic meals made by Chef Kent, to the day at the beach, or my very first drive-in movie ever, but this post would never get published.

So I will leave you with a picture that reminds me of the North:

Flin Flon.  I will miss the trees and the water and the great company, but definitely not the mosquitoes, horse flys or spruce beetles.

~b~