The Soo to Thunderbay - Tuesday Dec 14

After trying to sort out our computer problems, we set off from the Soo in bright sun and blue skies. The drive through to Thunder Bay was sooo beautiful. Typical Canadian scenery. The road was clear, and wound its way, up and down the craggy lake coastline, around smaller lakes hidden in crevices, and through forests of evergreen trees. Earlier in the day Lake Superior was covered with rain-mist, caused by the wind whipping up the water to form a shallow cloud floating across the Lake. But later, the sun came out to stay. We travelled through Pukaskwa Provincial Park and wondered if there had been a fire there some years ago. The best part was after Marathon and particularly around and after Terrance Bay. What a beautiful part of Canada this is. It seemed truly remote, and we noticed all the signs saying "Closed for the Season" including the "rest areas" along the highway! We waved to the Wawa Goose, Pooh Bear and Terry Fox....sites that we spent time at during our last trip in 2009. Sunset was stunning but unfortunately I couldn't get any pictures because there just wasn't an appropriate spot in the road. I have uploaded a few pictures though which will let you see the type of country we are passing through. There's not much snow and I suspect that in Central Ontario you have more snow than there is up here. We have been watching the news this evening and conditions really have been quite challenging around home. Thunder Bay is just a little smaller than Barrie and seems quite lively. Now we are cosily tucked up in our hotel room while the coldness settles on the outside world. It was about -18C when we came in. Not sure what the forecast is. Not sure where we will get to tomorrow. We will play it by ear!

Winter - 2010

When we announced we were driving out to Vancouver in December, our friends immediately divided into two camps. The first camp thought we were crazy, had lost our minds, and weren't fit to make decisions about our life. The second camp thought that we were about to embark on a great adventure and offered up all kinds of safety advice like take lots of candles and matches, and if you have to stop keep the engine running; and another....if your engine is running make sure your exhaust is not burried in a snow bank otherwise you will die from carbon monoxide poisoning. All very positive coments. Which camp is right, remains to be seen!!

We set off today around 11:30 this morning ....-14C ....and at the tail end of probably the season's first major snow storm in our area. Needless to say, driving up through Barrie and on to Sudbury was not much fun. Can you imagine being in a tub heaving in the rough ocean? This is what our drive was like. The ice packed rutty road, the snow streamers blowing over it, and the gale force wind made it tough to keep the car on the road. We were held up half way between Parry Sound and Sudbury while a tow truck pulled a car out of the ditch. But we did manage to keep the car on the road, and after Sudbury, it all started to smooth out. Around Massey, we spotted an enormous red triangle in front of us,then another in front of that....can you think what it was? It was two Mennonite horses and carriages. I just can't imagine how the passengers were keeping warm. At this point, the temperature was -18C and with the wind chill it felt like -29C....according to the local weather station. Now, you can blame the wind chill factor on our friend Randall since he invented it....but you can't deny the coldness of the weather. IT WAS FREEZING!! Tam - thanks for the chocolates. We ate some around tea time and they were delicious! We decided to keep driving and around 8:30 p.m. headed into Sault Ste Marie. This is a town of about 75,000 and we are staying close to the water front (St. Mary's River I believe). We had a lovely dinner in The Docks, a unique restaurant overlooking the river and the bridge to the US.

Before we left home our Internet had been down for 2 days....Xplornet....so we cursed and swore, and finally got over being frustrated as we knew we would be on the road and a pre-requisite of a hotel for the night was WiFi. Can you believe when we got into the room and tore our computers out of their bags and plugged them in and turned them on.....that the Internet wasn't working ....this time it was Shaw....so ....maybe Xplornet isn't alone in trying to tackle the weather conditions in winter Canada.....but really guys......you know where we live......it snows, it rains, it gets cold..... Anyway, it seems to be working now, so hopefully I will get this posted. We will take tomorrow as it comes and plough on as best we can. I note that in the summer, our first night was spent in Wawa. No idea how far that is from Sault Ste Marie, but let me tell you the winter is a whole different story. The country side is still pretty flat and uninteresting, but now the side of the highways are covered with dirty brown snow, and the granite shield is highlighted by the waterfalls of pecan coloured frozen water. Some, but not many, of the houses are lit up with Christmas lights, and the towns are adorned with santas, and bright stars, and manger scenes. I am looking forward to seing Sault Ste Marie tomorrow before we head off to our next destination.

Thursday August 20 -

Thursday was another beautifully warm day with sunny, blue, cloudless skies. We chilled in Banff in the morning; walked around the town; did some shopping; and took some photos. It was a typical holiday town, but in a beautiful setting, and really quite pleasant.

Our target today was Kamloops which we reckoned would be around a 6 hour drive. The scenery was absolutely spectacular; especially the drive through Kicking Horse Canyon. Tall rugged mountains all around us as we drove along the valley floor. We stopped at some of the sights along the way including the Spiral Tunnels. These tunnels were built for the trains that chugged up and sped down the steep incline of Kicking Horse Pass. Because of the steepness, numerous accidents occurred, so in 1909 the tunnels were built to improve the safety of train travel. Each tunnel makes a spiralling turn and trains actually cross over themselves. So, you might see an engine emergy from the upper tunnel while 15m below it, carriages are still entering the lower tunnel. Once we hit Revelstoke, the land flattened out, although here in Kamloops, we are still surrounded by beautiful mountains. Sunset brought a beautiful red sun reflected in the river water making it bright scarlet too. No doubt about it, the scenery is spectacular. We also saw a little black bear cross the highway in front of us, and we saw some mountain goats up the side of one of the rock faces as we passed on the road below.

Tonight we are staying in Kamloops and tomorrow we will hit Vancouver. Alanna is excited, and happy to be back in BC. Cass unfortunately, has caught Alanna's cold and is feeling really rotten!

Wednesday August 19

We were up early and on the road by 8:30 am. It was a beautiful, sunny day with blue cloudless skies, and warm temperatures. When we left Hinton, the Rockies rose up in front of us like a solid wall of granite. We passed a group of mountain sheep and took tons of pictures. By the time we reached Jasper, we were surrounded by high, grey mountains, richly vegetated with fir trees three quarters of the way up. We took a quick walk around Jasper and enjoyed its relaxed atmosphere and beautiful location. The drive down Highway 93 to Lake Louise was truly stunning and quite compares with other mountain ranges in the world. I think it is the vastness of the Rockies that consumes you. The mountains are all around, and the snow peaks peep up above the grey granite rock and make you shiver. The lakes are a beautiful aquamarine colour, but freezing cold, and I doubt you would last too long in them. In fact, they say it would only be minutes before you died of hypothermia if you fell into some of the rapids and waterfalls. We stopped at the Athabasca Falls and saw the 23-metre waterfall powering over the rocks and into the swirling river below. It is said to have the most powerful flow anywhere in the mountain parks. We drove down the Icefields Parkway and saw the Columbia Icefields; I must admit to being a little disappointed, but then you can only see 3 of the 7 icefields from the road. They looked grey and dirty and crawling with caterpillar-like sight-seeing vehicles. We stopped at lookouts for the high peaks and the glaciers, and amazed at the intense aqua colour of Peyto Lake and Bow Lake. Passing through all the splendour makes you realize just how insignificant humans are in the natural world, and yet at the same time, we can do so much harm. We stopped at Lake Louise and took too many pictures; then drove on to Banff where we arrived around 7:30 pm. Its a fun town, established, commercialized, but nonetheless alive. Our hostel is about a 5 minute walk from all the shops and restaurants which is perfect and we had a great dinner before walking back over the bridge for the night. When we arrived, before we even got our stuff out of the car, we saw a deer grazing along the edge of the river about 10 feet from the car. Later, the same deer had bedded down for the night under a tree in the garden of the hostel. How neat is that!

Monday August 17 and Tuesday August 18 – 4 Canadian Provinces

On Monday morning we rolled out of Kenora and on to Highway 17. It was raining. We passed roadworks, rural communities, and the border into Manitoba. The area around Winnipeg was a rich agricultural area but as a we drove north on 16, the Yellowhead Highway, we passed huge fields of barley, canola, and rye and rolled on through Manitoba’s bright green, golden yellow, and wheaten fields. We crossed the border into Saskatchewan and stopped for lunch in a tiny fast-food restaurant in Gladstone, the town of the “Happy Rock”! Get it…? Prairie wit, I guess!! We walked in to the restaurant and were greeted by a couple of old codgers one of whom had a broken arm which didn’t look as if it had been properly set, and who was eating a cup of ice-cream. They had some appreciative local comments which they addressed to the girls, without too much reaction. I don’t think they, the girls, totally understood the local jargon! We passed through Neepawa where Margaret Laurence was born. It was a neat little town with a beautiful four lane avenue lined with overhanging trees on both sides. We saw silver-grey silos, white grain elevators, and plump seagulls feeding on the dark brown ploughed fields. There was a lot of flooding in the fields which made the tiny ducks happy as they floated in the water picking up flies and other bugs and edibles as they went. The road ran parallel to the trainless-railway for miles but eventually in the evening we saw three freight trains moving sleepily along the tracks with a large number of carriages which would eventually be filled with the grain and other produce from the area. We eventually arrived at Saskatoon, found a motel, had a very late dinner, and crawled into bed. We were tired. We had driven about 1000 kilometers over the course of the day.
Tuesday started out raining and 15C. The long straight roads wound across the Saskatchewan prairies; pieces of blown truck tyres littered the highway. The odd straw bale found its way into the median in between the two parts of the divided highway. Yellow flowers lined both sides of the dual carriageway and separated the road from the fields of bright yellow canola which stretched into the horizon. Along the highway were lily filed watering ponds, and the land was undulating, and lush with trees acting as wind and snow breaks in the vast fields. We entered into Alberta, and stopped to take pictures at the “Welcome to Alberta” sign. Not much changed in the scenery until we passed through Edmonton, and reached a small town called Edson about 207 kms west of Edmonton. Then the landscape became more undulating and filled with fir trees. The Rockies tantalized us. They appeared in the distance at a high point on the highway, then disappeared. They appeared again as we passed the highest point on the highway, and disappeared, and then finally as we neared Hinton, they appeared and remained an omnipresence on the highway. You know you are approaching something that will consume you when you see them. We stopped for the night in Hinton located in the foothills of the Rockies. The town has about 10,000 inhabitants, a pulp mill, and tons of hotels. It is about 45 minutes from Jasper and we are looking forward to being right in the Rockies tomorrow.

The journey is long and tiring. The girls read magazines, listen to their i-Pods, play games on their cell phones, do crosswords, and word searches, sleep, and watch videos on the laptops. We all take it in turns to drive. But although we are appreciative of the scenery and the journey there is not much that is exciting and there is not much time for "fun". So far!

Sunday August 16 - Wawa to Kenora

The intellectual level in the car dropped dramatically this morning as we re-invented our childhood’s perspective of life. First, we stopped at the Wawa Goose on our way out of town to take pictures. This was constructed in 1960 to celebrate the opening of the Lake Superior Section of the Trans-Canada Highway. Until then the main access to Wawa was from steam boat on Lake Superior until 1941, or by railway after 1921. Next came the statue of “Winnie” in White River. This is a lovely story about the background to Winnie the Pooh. Apparently on August 24, 1914, Captain Harry Colebourn, a Canadian Army Veterinarian, purchased a black bear cub for $20 in White River, Ontario. The bear was named “Winnie” after Colebourn’s hometown Winnipeg, Manitoba. Winnie journeyed overseas and was left at the London Zoo for safekeeping when the troops went to France for active duty. Becoming the Zoo’s feature attraction Winnie captivated many, especially young Christopher Robin, son of the author A.A. Milne. Inspired by the bear and his son’s enthrallment, A.A. Milne began the stories of Winnie the Pooh. Although, Winnie went to that “great Hunny Pot in the Sky” in May 1934 at the age of 20, Milne’s books kept the Canadian bear alive through several generations. In 1988, a local resident discovered that Winnie the Pooh is originally from White River, and White River proudly proclaims its status as the birthplace of Winnie the Pooh by celebrating with Winnie’s Hometown Festival held the third weekend in August every year.
Beside the Winnie statue was a playground and our two “wannabe young again” 28/30 year olds had fun playing on the shute and having their pictures taken. Talking to dogs has also featured high in the trip. Already Cassandra and Alanna have made friends with a 9 month old Rotweiller and her handsome father, a Husky/Sheppard puppy and her four legged Husky friend, and a long haired golden retriever and Pyranese Mountain Dog who just about lept out of the back of the Toyota SUV they were travelling in to greet the girls.
We had lunch in Nipigon and back on the road again. We travelled along the shores of Superior and had some lovely views which were unfortunately marred by the haze hanging heavily over the water. The rain came just as we headed into Thunder Bay. Our spirits sobered when we visited the Terry Fox Memorial and we thought of the arduous journey young Terry undertook and the money his memory has amassed for the fight against cancer.
25 km outside Thunder Bay, we went into the Kakebeka Provincial Park to look at the Kakebeka Falls. The Falls are spectacular with the extra tons of water cascading over them from all the recent rainfalls.From there we had a fairly intense drive through some pretty, forested scenery, a heavy rainstorm, and moose/deer/bear infested country into Kenora where we are staying our second night.

Saturday August 15 - Off to Vancouver

I slept in on Saturday morning – the day we left for our trip to drive Alanna 4500 km to school in Vancouver. It could have been the late night previously, or that I didn’t sleep well, or simply that if I didn’t wake up, I didn’t have to start the journey. It’s not as if she is a kid; she is 28; it’s not as if she hasn’t lived away from home before, but somehow, Vancouver seems such a long way away.
The day was sunny and bright, and we locked up the house and were on our way. Ray and I had made the trip about 36 years ago and we wondered how much we would remember. Alanna has never made the trip.
The first part of the journey by-passing Parry Sound, Sudbury and Espanola was fairly typical Ontario countryside: rocky, lush vegetation, and not particularly memorable. From Spanish we travelled along the N orth Channel of Georgian Bay. It was undulating, craggy shorelines with beautiful views from the Highway 17 over the lake. We drove through lake-side towns of Blind River, Thessalon, and on to Sault Ste. Marie.
The film “One Week” will give you a much better description of the Toronto/Vancouver route. Our journey is completed with time restrictions and without much time to investigate points of interest along the way. But we did, and will, see some of the sights.
The beauty in the trip started at Sault Ste. Marie where Lake Huron and Lake Superior meet. We made the journey from the Soo to Wawa at sunset and loved the beautiful Canadian settings with views over the lake and fir trees peeping up in the foreground around the blazing orange ball of the sun. Driving at dusk kept us alert for moose, deer, and bears on the road!We spent the night in the Sportsman Motel with dinner first at the Viking. The Viking offered an eclectic mix of tourists and loud, colourful, boisterous locals, and a varied menu at just off Toronto prices.