Essential Canadian Experience #1: The Tipsy Canoe

Location: Kenora, ON
New Characters: Lucy and Chad 

It takes about 30 hours on the train just to cross the measly provincial border between Ontario and Manitoba. The same amount of time could get you across Europe. Canada is huge. With such a big country it is hard to imagine that there are certain cultural experiences that hold true for every Canadian, but there are a few remaining frontiers that any good Canadian or dedicated visitor should experience.

My first on this trip (other than the copious amounts of poutine), as you may have guessed from the title of this post, involves getting drunk in a canoe on the middle of a lake. This is a popular pasttime amongst recreational fishermen, but us lay people need to have fun too!

Evening was fast approaching, so we loaded up the cooler with the neccesary supplies, buckled up our life jackets and launched from the dock! Lucy was our first bar maker and song master, passing cups and shot glasses back and forth, and leading us in song from her fathers boy scout days.

Hey-ho the mighty river

Things took a turn for the worse when we drifted near a rocky piece of land, and certain boat inhabitants felt the desire to scale the rocks. Luckily the bow of our boat got stuck in the rocks before we were close enough to the land to attempt. It was also at this point that our cooler ran out, so any hopes of scaling rock were pushed aside for the immediate problem of refilling.

Lucy and I sat patiently in the boat as Chad hurried upstairs with the empty cooler. Then, out of nowhere, a giant wave swept under our boat! Lucy and I used all of  our seafaring skills to remain stable, but with the wave came a monstrous sea serpant who relentlessly crashed into our boat. We held on for longer than any weathered sea woman could have imagined, but the kraken was too much for us and eventualy we were tipped.

Chad returned with a full cooler only to see us rescuing our belongings from the lake.  We flipped the boat and gave it one last try, but we were flipped again by the merciless Kraken, and decided swimming wasn't so bad.

After leaving all our belongings on the dock to dry, we stumbled upstairs and went to bed promptly with the sun just after 9pm, our sea clocks kicking in!

*parts of this story have been exagerated for dramatic effect.