Sweatin' like a Finn

A couple of months ago Sean and I accompanied some friends (Anna, Jamie, Tobey & Nick) to Anna's camp on Nidya lake. "Camp" = "Cottage", for you southerners. Also, "May Long" = "May 2-4 weekend" and "Shag" = "Stag & Doe". "Near" = "more than 100km" and "Far" = "Winnipeg". Now that you're up to speed on the T-Bay lingo, on with the story.

Nidya lake is about 2.5 hours out of Thunder Bay (classified as "near"). Anna was bored by the conversation during the ride there, so she tuned us out and took a nappy nap.



Of course, as soon as we got there the boys were put to work preparing the camp for our stay.



The girls, on the other hand, cracked out the beer and simultaneously the bucks cracked out our fleshy bodies. We were feasted on. I've never seen so many mosquitoes in my life. You can't see it in this photo, but I had mosquitoes all over me. That's why Anna's laughing.



I think this photo of Anna is fit for a National Geographic cover.



These two are huddling in order to escape the bugs. When it comes to bugs, there's safety in numbers. If you huddle with friends they can help you scratch those hard-to-reach bites.

Fishes ho!! Nick led an expedition to the fish mines, but the boys came back empty-handed. The look so legit in the pictures. Standing in the boat and everything. Total pros.

The thing that made that weekend at camp bloggable was a new northern experience for me: a Finnish Sauna. The GTBA (Greater Thunder Bay Area) has a large Finnish population. More specifically, it has the highest concentration of people of Finnish origin per capita in Canada, ergo, the GTBA has a the highest concentration of saunas per capita in Canada. By my count, that's about a million saunas per person north of Wawa. Math! Fact! There's a piece of local folklore that says every time a sauna is mentioned in a blog, the number of saunas in the GTBA increases by the power of a jillion. For the record, I have only been in one of those bajillion saunas, and that sauna was at Anna's camp.

The basic premise of a Finnish sauna is that you get all steamed up in the sauna, then you jump in a freezing cold lake. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. So, true to tradition, that's what we did.

We got the sauna piping hot by stoking the fire in the stove for a couple of hours. Once the stove was good and hot, the sauna-ing began.

This is a shot of the inside of the sauna. The pic is pretty crappy because it was pitch black and when you brought the camera into the sauna the lens immediately fogged up and the picture turned into a hazy Liz Taylor movie. The solution - open the door and really quickly take a flashed-out crappy photo.

You can see the stove pipe and the rocks. We'd pour water on them to make steam. Here are some steamy shots from inside the sauna.

Once the heat in the sauna got unbearable, we'd fly out the door and jump in the lake.

Ahhh...thank goodness for the lake. Anyone who knows me well knows that I hate swimming in cold water, but I found that being overheated in a claustrophobic space motivates me to jump into cold water.

Check out these bathing beauties.

I tried to get a photo of all of us post-dip, but there's someone messing up the photo in every picture (usually Sean). We'll turn this into a Where's Waldo search. Find the following things in the three photos below:

Sean being too tall

Sean doing his best "Edward" from Twilight impression (hint - look for the teeth)

Nick looking disgusted

Jamie giving the evil eye

Anna giving the death glare

My head bent at a very strange angle

Tobey is missing in one photo

Sean giving kissy lips

We partook of the Finnish Sauna the next night as well, but it's just more of the same. More sweating, more swimming, more bad photography.

PS - did you hear that Shakira came out of the closet? It's true. She's actually a wolf. And she wins the award for 2009's most frightening dancer. She should be a guest judge on the first season of "So, You Think You Can Dance Frighteningly Canada". It will be sweeping the nation this fall. It will be filmed in my back yard. Consider this your formal invitation, Shakira!!