Monday, August 6, 2018

Canada Part 1: Ontario & Manitoba


I enjoyed Canada. Michigan was nice, but I feel like my trip really began in Canada.

I stayed in Sault Sainte Marie for two nights to catch up on customary hygiene rituals and finish the onboarding paperwork for my new job peddling curriculum with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH). The Soo is a nice town and I enjoyed exploring downtown. I also stumbled across the Canadian Bushplane HeritageCentre and spent a few hours learning about wildfires and the planes used to fight them.

A Beaver, a favorite plane among Canadian bush pilots

Unfortunately, between 12-hour access windows closing and usernames that did not work, I was not able to get my last bit of paperwork done. Frustrated to have this still hanging over my head, it was a relief that it was the weekend. There was nothing to be done until Monday.

Rising early Saturday morning, I started west on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Before I began, I made a list of possible places to stop and explore. In the end, that first day I just drove. I was nice to simply take things in without having a plan. The northern shore of Lake Superior is hillier and wilder than the southern. The rocks are more rugged and there are many more small islands. The view never stopped being beautiful. At a rest area overlook near Thunder Bay, I believe I was even able to see Isle Royale!

Hazy view of Thunder Bay. I think the little bit of land 
you can see at the far left is Isle Royale.

I had no worries about finding a place to sleep because there were a LOT of rest stops. The tricky bit was that not all had toilets. Most were roadside pullouts with trash cans, and the ones with restrooms were usually outhouses. I called it a night, along with several other drivers, at a lovely place along a lake just east of Kenora. This rest stop had picnic tables but no restrooms. I’ll spare you the details, but I have since worked out better ways to handle the call of nature when the forest is not that dense and the sky is not that dark…

The next morning brought me to Manitoba. Entering the Province, the pine forests opened up and I was surprised to see aspens alongside the prairie.

During a quick Wi-Fi check in the town of Brandon, I was pleased to see that, despite being a Sunday, my username issue was resolved. Quickly filling out the required forms (it took less than 10 minutes!), I felt relieved to have the freedom to spend the night in Riding Mountain National Park without the pressure of needing to check my email early Monday morning.

The hour drive north from Brandon to Riding Mountain was the most beautiful of my whole trip so far, mostly because it was so unexpected. I rounded a corner to saw nothing but bright blue skies, rolling hills covered with pine tree edged fields full of bright yellow flowers I now know to be canola. My attempt at a picture turned out poorly, so I’m borrowing this one:

Image result for canola fields in manitoba
https://www.producer.com/2014/08/canolas-demand-is-bright/ 

Riding Mountain is not actually a mountain. Instead it is a large rise in the land, and the higher altitude created an alpine-like biome. It’s basically a boreal forest a few hundred meters above the surrounding grassland. It would be a great place to do some trail running, but since I discovered the sole of one of my running shoes was broken, I stuck to hikes.

 View from my campsite

 Pikachu and Nick Fury guarding my snack from bears.

 Bull dozering the ashes

 Refilling the water bottles (I got it unclogged and it works like a charm)

My Little Pony photo bomb

Stove for winter camping 
(and the last known whereabouts of the My Little Pony friend...) 

 Morning at on of the Bead Lakes

That small hill is a 70+ year old pile of manure left over from an old saw mill

When I reentered civilization Monday afternoon, I was greeted with an email saying my job paperwork would be complete once they received a copy of my passport. After a moment of panic and the assistance of a very helpful librarian in the town of Dauphin, I got that taken care of and returned to the road! (By the way, I believe Dauphin, at 51.2N is the furthest north I’ve ever been, outside of a couple layovers at the Anchorage airport).

And with that, I left Manitoba in the rearview mirror.

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