Journey Day 3 - North Bay to Sault St Marie

Opening bedroom curtain and the view is ordinary in the extreme; dull sky over green grass and bushes. There is no denying that the overall colour of Canada so far is green.
Both feeling better now having largely adjusted to the time and having the events of the first couple of days of this trip behind us.

After a good breakfast at the Comfort Inn, North Bay, we hit the road. The sky was clearing into what was to be a blue sky day rising to 27C.

Lynne put it well yesterday saying, there's an awful lot of land with nothing going on. The wetlands continue though broken by some larger, flatter fields with grain and rapeseed. Occasionally the road climbs through higher ground where the bedrock is exposed. The rock when at the surface is like the shell of a rounded dome, I think this is glaciated terrain and these have been scoured smooth many thousands of years ago.

A down side of following the TCH, Highway 17 is that it is not easy to just stop to take photo's. There is a hard shoulder of sorts but it is gravel and sloping and traffic is constantly moving. There was one field of rape which was lit bright yellow in the sun and a small low barn sat low in amongst it; it was beautiful but you'll have to take my word as we drove on without stopping. I guess it is not dissimilar to viewing from a train except that on a train your hands are free rather than holding a wheel.

In the wetlands we often saw evidence of beaver activity, we saw several lodges in the middle of pools and caught sight of one beaver dam. These are ingenious animals creating complex engineering projects; the lodges have two entrances, one above water and one below; they collect saplings and anchor them to the bottom to provide a directly accessible winter food store; their dams start with a carefully aimed tree being cut down and then banked up and sealed with branches, stone and mud. Frustratingly, though we have been places where they are active we have yet to actually see one.

A large town, Sudbury, was on our projected route and about lunch time but as we approached, the highway moved into an upgraded section and with a 100kph max. and skirted up into higher ground and around the town. Sudbury was famed for atrocious pollution from Nickel smelting which had turned the surrounding area into such a dead state that it was used for astronaut training before the moon landings. In these more enlightened times a re-greening project is apparently having significant success.

We haven't yet got the hang of lunch. We are not finding the availability of ready made sandwiches that are everywhere in the UK and eventually had lunch as crisps, grapes and a banana from breakfast from the car and two cookies from a garage. It was actually just about right; all this driving screws with appetite and digestion. Not long after we got going again we stopped at an ice cream kiosk by a lake and chatted to the owner about world politics and particularly the reasons for and impact of Brexit. Frighteningly, one of the reasons he thought was that Europe was forcing the UK to take in immigrants!? Fake news travels. Anyway, my Black Cherry scoop was lovely and the view from his decking delightful.

We saw a man cycling along the highway wearing black trousers a neat white shirt with black tie and a trilby type hat which seemed a little odd. There were unusual signs at the side of the highway showing horse drawn carriages and then we saw several similarly dressed people in a two open carriages coming out of aside road then a covered carriage careering along the gravel hard shoulder. We presume the was a community nearby who were rejecting machine use. Several churches we passed were Seventh Day Adventist which may have been related.

Describing our passages is impossible in a summary like these posts; it's like describing a drive from Dover to Manchester taken in one day with all the different things you'd see along the way but the afternoon drive passed pleasantly running alongside a railway track with shiny rails so in use but we saw no trains,along rivers and by lakes and up and over ridges. Blue sky and a continuation of green.

We arrived at our hotel before 5pm which was good. Another 7 hour driving day. After catching up on things, including blog writing we drove into the town of Sault St Marie where a bridge crosses to the USA at the join of Lake Huron and Lake Superior. After pizza, we walked along the water front looking across to the US and were treated to another delightful setting sun evening.

Statistics: Miles today: 277 ; Miles so far: 619 ; Fuel added so far: 36.8 litres, 8 gals; Provinces: Ontario; Time Zone: UTC-4 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)