So here we go with a new blog. I've always been fascinated with the world and travel. Over the years I've been fortunate enough to travel throughout Canada and three other continents. I've been as far north as Ellesmere Island, 500 km from the North Pole, and as far south as New Zealand. I've been as far west as Vancouver Island and as far east as Taiwan. The experiences I've had traveling have shaped who I am today.
After spending almost four years traveling after I finishing university, I came back home to get settled down and go back to school. It's been tough though. I constantly get the urge to just pack my bags and catch the first plane out here to some exotic locale. Then my girlfriend brings me back down to earth and reminds me that I'm a broke student.
This new blog will be focused on travel. Tips, stories, news, and photos are things that I'm thinking of throwing up here over the course of the next few months.
I'll kick it off with an entry about travelling to a less than exotic, but still mysterious, locale.
Friday marked the 1st year CreComm Manitoba Travel Assignment. Twenty groups of students fanned out across Manitoba in search of stories and to basically harass people. Just kidding about the harassing.
I teamed up with my fellow Section Oners, Steve Dreger, Eman Agpalza, and Sean Angus. We decided that Manitoba wasn't big enough for us and that we needed to flip the script. We took out a map and our eyes were drawn to the extreme southeast corner of the province. Surrounded by the white background of Manitoba and the yellow of Ontario, there was this little piece of orange that was just hanging out in space on the far western shores of Lake of the Woods. On closer inspection, this was the Northwest Angle of Minnesota, a.k.a. the Nub.
We had all heard of this mythical place before, but none of us had ever journeyed down there before. It was quickly decided that we were going to head down to this geographical anomaly.
The Northwest Angle is the only part of the contiguous United States that is north of the 49th parallel. It exists solely due to 18th century geographers not being able to map the region properly. When the American Revolutionary War was concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, British and American diplomats agreed that the border between the U.S. and what would eventually become Canada would run right through Lake of the Woods, until it reached the Mississippi River. The only problem was the source of the Mississippi was several hundred kilometres to the southeast of the lake. Eventually the border was set at the 49th parallel and the Northwest Angle remained as the property of the U.S.
That left the Angle existing all by itself separated from the rest of the United States by two border crossings and about seventy kilometres. The eighty permanent residents of the Angle are mostly all employed in the local fishing lodge industry, the life blood of the community. Winter or summer, fishermen travel from all over the American Midwest to hit the lake in search of the area's legendary walleye, northern pike, and musky.
With this legendary fishing in mind, we set out east along the Trans Canada Highway in search of the mysterious Nub.
Part two coming soon...
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