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?

Nestor Falls, Ontario

Nestor Falls on Caliper Lake

It is strange where one finds oneself sometimes.   We are at a place called Larsson’s Camp in the heart of fishing and hunting territory in western Ontario.  The cabin we are in is about 10 meters from a shallow lake called Caliper Lake in the Canadian Shield.   It has all the comforts of home provided those comforts don’t include cell-phone reception, Internet or television.  The camp, apparently, was built seventy years ago but it reminds me more of my childhood in the 50’s.   It really is not such a bad place – it is tranquil, quiet and the scenery is beautiful.  After so long on the prairies it is nice to see trees, hills and water.

Yesterday we ended up in Kenora, Ontario.   Ontario!   I can’t believe it.   Almost halfway across the county!

I thought that perhaps I should slow down a little on my ride when I pulled into a snow-plow turnaround for a little break and thought I had done a “Back to the Future” thingy.   There was an orange Volkswagen Micro-Bus parked there with two guys in tie-died T-shirts, shoulder-length hair and headbands trying to get it started.  I quickly checked my cell-phone for the date but, strangely, there was no signal…  One guy asked how far I was riding and I told him to St. John’s NFLD and he just said “Oh Wow”.    They had poured gasoline into the tank of the Volkswagen but it was pouring out onto the road underneath so I thought it best that I ride away quickly before they tried to start the engine. 

 The ride into Kenora was hot.  Very hot!   Normally heat does not bother me when I am riding, but I felt it yesterday!   I thought at one point that I would spontaneously combust.   I am not sure what the temperature was but it felt like the hottest day yet. At one point I had stopped for a break just inside the city limits and looked over to see a deer sitting in the shade of one of the nearby buildings.   He didn’t even look over at me.  He was too hot to move.

 As soon as I got to Kenora Telen took me to the nearest Dairy Queen.   There was a long line-up, as you can imagine, but it disappeared quickly when I arrived.  There is something to say for being hot, smelly and dripping wet.   

Kenora is a very nice little community on the Lake of the Woods.   Very picturesque and a little touristy.   This is the last weekend of the year when fishing is free so there were lots of boats out on the lake.  One of the most popular fish to catch here is called a Crappy.   I think they have to stop pumping raw sewage into the lake.

On our way here we just about nailed a bear.  He ran across the road right in front of us.   That is the second time that has happened on this trip.   The first time was in BC.  So far we have spotted three bears.   Luckily I was in the car on all three occasions.  I had to slam on the brakes this last time, which caused all our stuff to slide forward in the car.   It was amazing how much more room we had in the back when everything was piled up against the back of the front seats…  I thought this was a young grizzly bear because of her blonde colouring, but they don’t have griz in this area.   The blonde colour explains why she ran out in front of a moving car.