Day 16 - Ignace to Thunder Bay

Mon. May 19, 2008

So. F*cking. Cold.

We quickly found out why nobody’s camping. After lamenting the fact that it’s 31 degrees in Brooks, we had a short cry about the 4ºC humid weather and tried to build a fire. Riley, god of fire as he is, unfortunately couldn’t light soaking wet logs on fire (although he was still able to make a pretty good blaze using nothing but tinder =). We decided to just call this one a loss and drive to Thunder Bay (skipping our camping night in Terrace Bay). We did check out a sweet waterfall before headed on though.

The Great Lakes started being our constant driving companion at this point, making for some gorgeous lookouts. Riley’s still looking hard for a moose spotting.


Riley and Kimberly enjoy our first, hard earned, fire.

We turbo’ed on to Thunder Bay. Resupplying was lots of fun. Apparently on Holiday Mondays, NO grocery stores are permitted to open, by law. Lovely. Even the Walmarts and 24 hour A&P’s had shut their doors. *sigh*. We ended up restocking at a Shopper’s Drug Mart which was PACKED with people doing... you guessed it, grocery shopping. We’re not sure how they managed to skirt the law, but we were grateful and just took our damned heating pads.

Thunder Bay itself was surprisingly large. We did take a peek at Terry Fox’s monument – he apparently stopped his cross country trek in this city. He apparently also decided to do a cross country roadtrip, except he started his in the East, and his was just a bit more impressive, having been done on one leg and running and all.

We carried onto Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, and here another gongshow started. The half hour drive in was pretty, there were a ridiculous number of deer (and one black bear cub) lining the road. However, it being a holiday, the park entry workers decided to go home at 5 despite telling us we could arrive as late as 8 PM. That’s OK, there’s sure to be park wardens...

Nope.

Well... maybe we’ll just drive to our camping spot anyhow and tell them in the morning. But HTF does one get firewood? On top of that, we quickly realized that again, we were the only campers.

Oops.

That said, some friendly Ontario camp reservation specialist was either in a bad mood or had a quirky sense of humor because they assigned us the smallest camp ground out of the closest 30, and also the one physically farthest from the ‘comfort station’ (since the closer one was under repairs). A quick call to the reservation hotline informed us that our best bet was to find a park warden to switch campsites (been there, done that...) and to try and buy firewood from a local vendor (in a secluded provincial park). We ended up foraging wood (we loaded a bunch into the car from a hiking path – I know... BAD campers, BAD!), and snagging what we could from the tantalizing (but barbed wire fence surrounded) firewood harvesting compound.

On the plus note, it was quite pretty and there was tons of wildlife. One sketchy deer kept on coming up to our campsite and trying to beg for food. We know better so we politely told the deer to piss off. Besides, we were hungry. We also saw a porcupine that tried to escape from us by climbing a tree verrrrrrrry slowwwwwly.

Thankfully, it was warmer tonight than yesterday. It was also a full moon tonight, which was eerily bright – we even cast shadows! Hopefully tomorrow will bring about better weather.

Click for more moonlight with blue sky. Creepy.

Day Distance: 339 KM


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