St Ignace, Michigan to Parry Sound, Ontario – 366 miles
It was a
long driving day, but we wanted to get as close to Peterborough as we could so
tomorrow’s drive won’t be so long. We
dumped the tanks and filled up with fresh water before leaving the state park,
then stopped at a grocery store to stock up on a few non-perishables at the
cheaper US prices. We also topped off
the propane tank when we filled up with gas in St Ignace, then stopped in Sault
Ste Marie to get the oil changed in the Tiger before crossing into Canada. The lines were short, only three vehicles
ahead of us at the toll booth for the international bridge over the Soo Locks
on the waterway between Lakes Superior and Huron, and a single car ahead of us
at Canadian customs on their side of the bridge.
It was
11:00am when we pulled out of customs and started down Highway 17, the same
Trans-Canada Highway that we’d driven on back in Saskatchewan a few days
ago. We followed the TCH all the way to
Sudbury, about 190 miles, before turning south on Highway 69, the main
north-south route down to Toronto (although we won’t be going all the way to
Toronto). The scenery along the TCH was
very similar to what we had been seeing as we crossed the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan, although more sparsely settled and hillier than the UP. As we neared Sudbury, and even more so after
we turned south from Sudbury, we were on the Canadian Shield, a vast block of
the earth’s crust that was essentially scraped bare by the glacial sheet during
the last ice age. The shield covers a
large portion of this part of Ontario, and can even be seen in portions of the
western provinces and the adjacent border states, but is especially evident
here. While it probably appears
relatively flat from the air, it is actually a rolling landscape of exposed
rock outcrops punctuated by innumerable lakes, ponds, and bogs, and crossed by
streams and rivers of all sizes. On the
GPS screen on our dashboard, it looks like the skin of a fair Irish lass,
except the freckles are irregular blue dots and splotches of varying sizes on a
white background, broken only by the single yellow ribbon of the highway upon
which we were traveling. Where the rock
is exposed, it is scoured into smoothly rounded shapes as might be expected
from the thousands of years of extremely slow glacial movement that shaped this
land. Where the rock is not exposed, the
surface is generally forested, although the topsoil layer is very thin – in
places only a few inches deep.
Off to
the west, from a few isolated high points, we could catch glimpses of Georgian
Bay, a large off-shoot of Lake Huron which lies behind a string of islands
several miles out from the eastern shore of the larger lake. On a map of the Great Lakes region, Georgian
Bay appears almost as large as the smaller of the Great Lakes, Erie and Ontario;
however, technically speaking, I guess that because it is merely a large body
of water separated by a few islands from the larger body of Lake Huron, it
doesn’t qualify as a lake.
Our
original plan was to stop at a KOA campground just outside Parry Sound, but
after driving by the KOA and seeing that it was located down in a wooded hollow
that was infested with black flies, we decided to return to the town and do
some urban boondocking at the local Walmart parking lot. I was hoping to post this as well as the posts
from the last two days, but we’re far out in the fringes of the parking lot and
the wifi signal from the store is too weak to do an upload. There’s a McDonald’s just up the street, so
maybe we’ll stop there for breakfast in the morning and, if they have wifi,
post these entries then.
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