Summertime

Although I do know a few people who's favourite season is winter, for the most part, the ones I know love summer.  It is part of the reason I named my blog as I did, the idea for most Canadians of dodging the cold dark months is deeply appealing.

Even those who truly love the winter sports usually find at some point longing for the warm long days of summer.

I did not talk to many of the locals from Central America, and thus did not get their point of view on it, but the thing I find truly special about the summer days in Canada, especially northern Canada is the long long days when the sun seems so reluctant to go down and dusk hangs in the air for hours after the last bit of the sun slid below the horizon.

It is the time of camp fires, laughing with friends, toasting wieners and marshmallows, watching for fireflies, and listening to the wildlife.

Spending time in the tropics, where the sun sets and the dusk lasts for maybe twenty minutes, makes me treasure the long slow light of the early summer evenings even more.

From May until now, I have been bust catching up with friends, giving a hand here and there as I am capable.  Introducing those who love garlic to the devine deep fried garlic chip.  Helping paint a place, helping move.  Going over my pictures with many people.

Now I am at my parent's place in the small town of Kinistino SK, getting minor things done, stuff they had built up for me to do knowing I would be glad to help them with it.

I have not posted anything in the past couple months mostly due to the fact I do not feel like I am traveling, mere moving amongst friends and family.  This is after all the country where I grew up and spent my first 50 years.  I mostly feel there is nothing special about most of it, until you start to experience it. 

Saskatchewan is a big province, most usually noted for the flat boring plains of the south-central area.  But it is the very nature of those boring flat plains that help give you a feeling of just how big Canada is, and it is not until you have spent hours driving through the prairies with no significant changes in scenery, no cities, no lakes, just fields stretching from horizon to horizon that you get down deep in your bones that Canada is truly a huge place of great agricultural production.  Once you get north of Saskatoon, the topography slowly changes to rolling hills and poplar trees, with birch and pine mixing in as you go farther north.   Once you get into the north, the fields all but disappear and the lakes become innumerable and the skeeters on the wet years (like this one) become unbearable when around areas with grass and shrubs.

But more than the views from the seat of my motorbike, it is  the people that make the province, and they do make it worth the visit.  From the friends of my parents, to the families of the people I went to school with to the new met and chance met strangers, it is the people that bring me back here.

Sometimes I think that it is strange that as someone who is mostly an introvert, that meeting new people is what has prompted me to travel more than anything else.

But just as meeting new people in Central America shows me different aspects of what it is to be human, so does meeting new and old friends here remind me that we are not so different after all.

And if anyone wants a few pictures of life in small town Canada, post a comment and I will see what I can do.