North Bay, where family and lifestyle come first.

Seriously. That was the slogan of North Bay. Can you imagine New York, Toronto or London saying something like that. It would be interpreted very differently.

The city boosters could have called it;
"North Bay, where the insects with no mouths come to die". But that may have been vetoed by the tourism North Bay people.

Like many northern cities, we ominously pass a  Walmart on the outskirts of town and then we know... the downtown core is toast. The situation was no different in North Bay. Some good second hand bookstores, a health food stores, and a bunch of closed clothing and furniture stores. Maybe a boarded up haberdashery.

So we took transit downtown, and stopped by the North Bay museum to talk to Leslie (from Ottawa's) sister, Lyndsey. She was apparently enthusiastic about the shad flies. So we didn't mention that they are kind of horrendous. And kind of awesome. Every year, once a year, they come out of Lake Nippissing to die. They don't even have mouths, so certain are they that they are doomed. The walls and sidewalks of streets are covered with them. I'd seen them once before, back as a tree planter, when I visited here to crunch along the streets. And they're not even sparkly, or brightly coloured. They're kind of wormy, but with wings.

That said, we did get to go on the North Bay carousel, which was really cool. With pictures of hockey players, moose and birch trees.  And the really good museum, where I learned a number of facts:


1. we're still in an ice age
2. there were giant beavers
3. there were a kind of short horse called yukon horse, 10,000 years ago. I thought horses were introduced by the colonizers. But apparently not.