Sunday, May 26, 2024

Around Thunder Bay, Ontario

Happily, we found a McDonald’s again so we were off to breakfast at McDonald’s. The menu is different up here which was kind of surprising but we found enough to make us feel normal.

 Our first excursion was a drive 30 mile drive back the road we drove yesterday to one of the amethyst mines. We thought we were going to Diamond Willow Mine , but there was another mine right before that final turn off that was Blue Point so we stopped there. The bugs were terrible. They just swarmed us and we of course forgot the bug spray back at the RV .They had a gift shop, of course, nothing fancy and I found one inside there that I like that he priced me for five dollars US.  We looked around there and got information and instruction,  then we walked up the road to the rock pile. We got our walking sticks out of the jeep. He provided us with a bucket and any tools that we wanted so we took a hammer and a pic.  The first place we stopped, I took about a step forward on the pile and saw a stone I liked to I backed up a step and stumbled backwards and fell all the way to the ground. Joe tried to help me up, then he fell down so we both managed to scramble our way back up, but that was not a very good beginning.   I fell mostly on my back and skinned my hand just a little bit, but my shoulder is really sore now so that’s not good. We did pick up about 3/4 of a bucket of rocks and went back in the gift shop where I bought the one in there that I liked.   He sold it all to us for $25 Canadian or $20 US. I used some of my Canadian money from last night to pay for it. He told us the best place to find animals was out on the Sleeping Giant  Peninsula which is a wilderness preserve.  That is on our way back so we’ve got three stops to make on our way back. Everything I was carrying went flying -- my walking stick, bucket, pic, purse. I’m probably done mining for the day-- for this trip-- so we’ll see what we can see from the jeep now.  Joe is a little sore on the butt but he says he's not too bad.They told us to use iron out or something like that to get the rust out and then he uses a sander.  At Blue Point, we could walk up to the pit that was fenced off. It’s not open to the public and it’s flooded right now, but he told us that they allow groups to come in who are carrying their own liability insurance. He also said they see black bears back there frequently and run them off or they call the Mounies who come in and yell at the bear and spray them with pepper spray. He said if we happen to see one too close all we have to do is yell and hold up our hand and they will expect to get sprayed so they will takeoff. 

This small raging creek or river was on the road back to the mine.  They said you can pick up amethyst rocks on the banks but we didn't think that was our cup of tea.

A pile of rocks to pick through, this is where we fell.

The pit.

Doesn't he look like a prospector -- especially with the turquoise purse.

Inside this "gift shop".

We just had to walk this little short road back to the pit.  Which was a good thing.

Diamond Willow and Blue Point are the two mines on this road .  We did drive back to the other one.  They had a beautiful gift shop and beautiful pieces of washed, shined up amethyst. They were a little pricier, but their gift shop was really nice and they had quite an inventory of amethyst outside

Some  beautiful pieces.

Back on the road, we turned off on the .Sleeping Giant road, again on the lookout for wildlife.  At the end  of this road, right back at Lake Superior, was a surprise -- a general store and a community called Silver Islet.  There was a harbor which gave boats a direct run to Lake Superior,  This was 23 miles from the main highway one way, and we went by a few side roads that led to campgrounds, and houses.

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Joe took one of his kind of side roads down to Moonlight Beach on Lake Superior.  He took a video of this little drive so I’ll see if I can include that on this Blog; thank goodness for roads marked private road -- otherwise we would never get back to civilization. We finally saw was one deer and one hawk and it was 58 mile loop. We messed around on this backroad for about 3 hours, came out at the turnoff to the amethyst mine, 7 miles back.

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We first thought this might be a swan but we think it's a white pelican, which is what we probably saw yesterday.

Some pretty sturdy boats back here.

This is the road to Moonlight Beach.  We could have driven into the water.  Not much beach though.  Apparently, the video won't load, but this is the road.

We headed back toward Thunder Bay, but stopped at the Terry Fox Memorial, honoring the Canadian, a young, one-legged cancer victim who ran across most of Canada in support of cancer research.  He eventually succumbed to cancer just up the highway from this Memorial.  It’s a very nice statue and has a nice visitor center. It looked like, but it was closed. 

Then we came into town to find some dinner -- we had missed lunch and its now 6:00 p.m.  We had a bag of potato chips and two muffins in the jeep, and so we’re starved. We were looking for a steak place and ended up at a steakhouse called Prospectors, which is across the street from the casino we were at last night. We circled it 3 times looking for a parking space and ended up parking at the casino. The block in front of the restaurant is closed for construction and the street beside it was one-way the wrong way for us.  We decided to make this our "goodbye to Canada meal," and it was certainly pricey, but everything was good.

After dinner, we tried to find the ship terminal or harbor.  We drove up and down along the Lake but it took a while to find the roads that would actually take us to the boats and ships.

It was a long day, from 10:00 am to 10:pm, still daylight when we got home. My shoulder is pretty tender so tonight should be interesting.

 Saturday, May 25, 2024

Thunder Bay, Ontario

We were on the road by 9 o’clock this morning, heading back to Nipigon to the tire dealer/tow truck.  It rained again during the night but was 42 when we got up this morning.  It’s still partly cloudy so we’ll see which way the temperature goes today.  We arrived at Best Towing right at 10 o’clock.  They got right on us and it only took about 45 minutes, and the good news was that it only cost us $86 in Canadian money.

Joe has been having a terrible time finding diet sodas,  but when we had lunch yesterday at KFC, they had diet Pepsi in a fountain drink, so after we finished with the tire, we drove back through town to get sodas.   It was 10 minutes till 11 and they didn’t open until 11 so we had to wait, but we finally got on the road at 11:07, headed to Thunder Bay.

We arrived in Thunder Bay without incident -- no sightings of any animals.  We still had the view of Lake Superior most of the time, as well as rivers, creeks, and water descending over the rocks along the highway.

Once we’ve seen a bear, we are on the lookout for anything that’s dark so we’ve been paying a lot of attention to dark, brown and black stumps. We looked hard at the area where we had seen the bears yesterday, but apparently they had moved on. But nearer Thunder Bay, the highway moose crossing signs have now changed to deer crossing signs, so I don't know if that means we are out of moose country.

 The campground here is really nice. The weather improved, the sun came out and it got up to 54°, probably the warmest day we’ve had in a couple weeks. It'a supposed to be a high of 65 in Thunder Bay today.  Our campsite here is right on the river, however there’s a wooden fence around this park and so we can barely catch a glimpse of it from the  RV..  None of these campgrounds have been busy. There is one camper in front of us, and a couple of what look like rentals beside us. I don’t know if they’re occupied or not.  They do have rentals available here, we saw a row of them as we drove in to the Registration Building.  There is more than one campground here so there may be more than we see.

We are both just tired, so we took it easy this afternoon.  I persuaded Joe to go out to dinner at the casino so I got to play for a couple hours.  I actually won a little -- not sure how much because I had to convert my U.S. dollars to Canadian dollars for the machines, but the casino won't convert them back.  

The food was ok.  Joe ordered a half-rib and he only got 3 ribs.  Seemed a little sparse.  I ordered fettuccini alfredo but I forgot to have them add the chicken, but it was really good.  The casino was non-smoking, which suprised me, since there are a  lot of smokers up here.  We got back to the campground around 8:00 p.m. and Joe drove around this park to check it out.  Not much going on right now.  They do reenactments of some battle, but I don't know if they have opened the season for that.  We will check that out tomorrow.  We are here for 3 nights, and we are 37 miles to the bridge into the U.S.  We haven't planned beyond here, except that we are tire shopping in Duluth.  Time to get the map out.

  Friday, May 24, 2024

Nipigon, Ontario

First of all, we want to congratulate our grandson, Andrew, on successfully graduating from 5th grade today.  He will move on to middle school in the fall.  We were really sorry to miss this event in his life.  I texted Bridgette, "a small step for Andrew, a giant step for Bridgette," since she is having a little issue dealing with him growing up.  She agreed.

We really like this campground, and our campsite is nestled in the trees, just a short walk to Lake Superior and the rocks.

Since Joe has never been able to contact anyone in Nipigon about his tire issue, he decided we would drive over there and try to find a tire dealer.  We will be traveling these same miles tomorrow, but he needed to resolve the tire thing. BUT -- the most exciting thing happened on the way to Nipigon -- WE SAW 2 BEARS!  They were right beside the road but we didn't see them until we were right beside them, and I yelled 'BEARS'.  Joe stomped on the brakes, then backed up but I guess all that spooked them because they were gone.  But we slowly moved forward, and we found them again.  Now they were hidden in the brush, but there actually is a black spot just left of the dark evergreen tree, and that's a bear.

We continued on to Nipigon with our eyes peeled now, but we didn't see anything else.  As we approached this town, this bridge welcomed us.  This bridge failed in 2016, it lifted the road up, and had major repair.  It is very pretty, and has blue lights that we think shine brightly at night.  This bridge separates East and West Canada.

This is the view of the bridge from downtown.

So we found the towing company that had been suggested (the person across the street had given us the wrong phone number and no name, so Joe had never got to talk to them.)  Ironically, we had to wait for a semi backing up into their garage for us to park.  It turned out the semi was delivering a truckload of truck tires.  Unfortunately, nothing fit our needs.  But they did agree to rotate the bad tire to the back and the back tire to the front for us, so we are stopping here tomorrow to get that taken care of, then we will continue on to Thunder Bay.

We drove around the town a little.  We passed this one house with the yard full of decorations, especially gnomes.  I think Brenda would be impressed with this.

There is a marina/campground here but it isn't open for the season yet.  We did drive through it, and saw the boat ramp.

We saw these large white birds on a little sandbar in the Nipigon River.  I thought they might be swans, or white pelicans.  Hannah's job in Oregon as a park ranger had an assignment one day of counting the swans in the park.  Maybe she can tell what these are.

They had carvings and statues in town.  I particularly liked this one of the bears.  They also had a big fish, a wolf, and an eagle. 

As we drove out of town, a train was passing the bridge.  The trains up here are very long, and they come through quite often.

Joe wanted to drive a little up Highway 11, so we took a side trip past Lake Helen.  This highway is a scenic loop road connecting with highway 631 to White River, then back to Nipigon on Highway 17.  Too many miles for a day trip.  But we turned around after 8 miles.

There was road construction on this highway, and when we came back through it, we got between two constructions vehicles with yellow lights flashing.  We felt like we were being escorted, maybe as a "wide load."  The second picture is through my side mirror so it isn't very good, 

Back on Highway  17 and heading back to camp, we stopped at an overlook.  We were in view of Lake Superior most of this drive.  

Joe climbed up the boulders to the higher level for a better view, but had to give some thought as to how he was going to get down.  Good thing the fence was there.

We made note of the location we saw the bears and a side road just past that, so on our way home we drive that road.  We started seeing deposits of scat (bear? moose?) and continued on for an hour or so (17 km) but never saw any sign of the depositors.  And we looked hard.

This road had lots of ponds, creeks, some lakes, some rivers.  This one was running really hard.

This is our idea of a "moosey pond."  There should have been one standing in there, but no.  It was empty of wildlife.

I persuaded Joe to turn around so I could get back to my rock collecting.  I got my feet wet yesterday (who knew to bring rubber boots?) so I came up with a plan -- to wrap my shoes with grocery bags.  Well, that worked for a while, but not long, and I ended up with wet shoes and wet feet again. 

But the rocky ledge I had wanted to wade out to was closer in today, and there was a dry, rock pathway  to it, so I got to collect rocks from there.  I'm sure they were better than the ones on shore.  I do think I found an agate, which was exciting.

This creek runs right behind our campsite and into the Lake.  It was running hard today.  Most of the rivers up here are this tea-color.

Here I am with my scooper, hard at work.  I keep thinking if Brenda was here with me, she would be saying, "Oh, look at this one."  

After about a half hour, my back was killing me so I worked my way to the bank with my heavy bag of rocks.   Joe stayed down with me today and had occupied my chair for a while, but he finally started walking the beach and picking up a few rocks too.  So I continued rockhounding from a sitting position.

Joe carried my heavy bag to the Jeep and I carried the chair.  It was all we could do to get back to the RV, get out of the Jeep, and get up the 6 steps into the RV.  I'm pretty sure we are too old for this hobby of mine.  And I'm very sorry about that because collecting rocks is one of my favorite activities.  I just wish it didn't hurt.