Oh, Canada!

In a couple weeks, my husband and I will head to the Great White North (Ok, it's not so white right now, mostly green) for our first-ever week-long fishing excursion in northern Ontario.

I have to concede, I have caught the fishing bug lately. There's nothing like fishing after dark, the lake backlit by the rising moon. Friday Nels and I went musky fishing on a small lake north of where we live and I caught a huge small mouth bass after dark. (Alas, no muskies on this trip but we had some follows.) The bass put up quite a fight, which was fun to experience - my first brawl with a fiesty fish - and it was even more fun to overhear my husband tell his friends and brothers about the "monster" small mouth bass I caught.

But I'm worried about this trip to Canada. Here we live less than 30 minutes away from dozens of great fishing lakes. I can go home at night, sleep in my own bed and don't have to worry about bears or moose attacks. (Although we have a large raccoon with an attitude that seems to enjoy mauling our bird feeders.)

Canada will be a different story. The cabin my husband booked at this small resort offers the bare-minimum amenities surrounded by nothing but miles of water and the Canadian forest. We have to pontoon 12 miles on this lake just to get to the small resort. This is not Madden's or Cragun's. There's no Target or Cub Foods down the road. We have to bring everything in with us that we will need for the week.

There's a showerhouse, but I'm not sure if we share it with 20 other smelly anglers or just the smelly angler I'm bringing up north with me. We have our own outhouse, my husband assured me, but no running HOT water in our cabin. Oh, and no electricity either.

I'll be heading north across the border with an open mind. ... but if there's nowhere to plug in my hair dryer, I'll be heading back to Minnesota with hair that looks like tightly curled hairballs our cat Sam threw up.

But that's Canada, eh?