Thunder Bay

Thunder Bay, Ontario

Halfway!

Well, maybe more than halfway – we actually passed that marker back in Manitoba, but there was just a sign on the road and some canola plants.  However, Thunder Bay is the closest city to halfway…   

So, here we are.  

At first my impression of Thunder Bay is “where is everyone?”   We are staying at the Prince Albert waterfront Hotel in beautiful downtown Thunder Bay.   However there is almost no one on the street and the majority of stores are boarded up with extraordinary cobwebs and copious amounts of dust.  We asked at the restaurant where the major shopping area was and she said, “right here”.  We found a Laundromat down the street and the walk there was as if someone had set off a neutron bomb.  We saw very few people and they all seemed to be furtive shadows.  It is like one of those horror movies where you walk out of a creepy store and when you turn around to go back in it isn’t there and never was.

It turned out that there was a “summer in the park” event happening down at the waterfront and everyone was there.   So we went to hear the free music and get away from the macabre downtown area.   Bad went to worse.  There were lots of people there with their folding lawn chairs and picnics lunches.  It was like a very scaled back version of Symphony Splash but instead of the Victoria Symphony we were groovin’ to Captain John and the Polka Pirates.

  

We preferred the spooky silence of downtown.

We did find the life centre of Thunder Bay, however.   Today we went to Fort William Historical Park.   On the way we came to the part of town where it started looking a lot like Richmond.  Big box stores, shopping centres, people – all the things you expect to see in the city of 100,000.   What a relief.  I thought I had inadvertently wandered into the Twilight Zone.  

Fort William was great.   It is a restoration of a Fort that was part of the North West Company’s chain of forts involved in the fur trade.   Everyone who worked there was in costume and in character.  I learned a lot about the early life in Canada.  We were witness to the arrival of voyageurs arriving from the west with a canoe loaded with furs and the arrest and imprisonment of a drunk.   The former is not something you can see in Victoria.  Both of us really enjoyed our day there.

Lake Superior is huge.  The largest lake in the world and I am looking at it out of my window.   It is hard not to confuse it with the ocean. Truly, it is amazing that all that water out there is fresh water.  The Rockies were incredible, the prairies were unbelievable and now Lake Superior is amazing.   All these incredibly large landscape features in Canada.

What is it we are trying to compensate for?