La La La Ronge

I said that I would tell you about La Ronge. La Ronge was lovely. Our hostess had the whole weekend planned for us, and it was excellent northern hospitality.

She hosted two dinners while we were there, gave us a tour of town and of the public library, arranged to have us tour the new provincial PNLS facility, and generally had lots of good chats with us over glasses of wine. We were very well behaved, I must assure you, though, as I was asleep every night by 10:30 p.m. One other touristy thing: we even stopped at the general store, which has animal skins in the back that you can touch (there are still people up there who live by trapping). 9The squirrel skins were rather disturbing, for obvious reasons, but I'll get over it.)

La Ronge is four hours north of Saskatoon, and the town itself is interesting for a number of reasons. It is in the middle of a national/provincial park (can't remember), which makes municipal development/land use more complicated. It is also closely surrounded by indian reserves, which makes development look oddly unplanned. As we drove through town, she would say, "Now we're on the reserve," and then two minutes later, "Now we're in town again," and then, "Oh, now we're on reserve land again." We popped in and out and in and out; it was very odd.

The people were incredibly friendly up there, and we had a great time. I'd recommend it, if you have the time to drive up. Where I live, by the way, they call "down south". Heh.