Ocean-to-Ocean, Part 5

After 13 days travelling I was in need of a laundry, which happened to be located in the basement of the hotel that I had just checked-into in Barrie. The following morning I would avail myself of that facility then, following a few exchanges of e-mails, arranged to take a quick drive to have lunch with a very gracious fellow Puffin, who lives a short distance down the road.

I won’t give too much away but he lives in a lovely little town, which can only really be described as the Canadian equivalent of a rural English village. The architecture was obviously very different, but it was all neat & tidy and had all of the shops & services that anyone would need. Anyway, he very kindly bought me lunch & told me of his ongoing woes caused by last year’s ice storm (something entirely alien to us Brits) and I promised to return the favour if he & his wife ever visit the UK.

With a suitcase full of clean clothes again, it was time to start heading west, but not before a further flurry of e-mails with another Puffin suggested a more scenic route to my next destination and a meet-up at a restaurant in Sudbury, which was vaguely on the route that he was taking back to his home in the north after visiting a family member. He was another extremely nice chap, to whom I owe another lunch. We toasted fallen Puffin DK, who he had met the previous year, and parted ways, him heading north and me following the picturesque shores of Lake Superior to Sault Ste. Marie. It was a pleasant enough place with a pedestrianised waterfront area, but I was keen to get some miles (or kilometres) under my belt, so there was only time for a brief visit.

Not far along the road after setting off the following morning, I stumbled across Agawa Bay, known for its spectacular lakeside scenery and pictographs painted on the underside of an overhanging cliff in the 17^th century. In such glorious weather with crystal blue water, it almost looked like it could be in the Caribbean.

And so the scenery continued for 437 miles – Ontario is huge and much more scenic than I expected. Eventually, I reached my destination for the next two nights, Thunder Bay, previously known as the twin towns of Fort William and Port Arthur. This was an opportunity to stock up on supplies, visit the city and to stop my wristwatch nagging me about my lack of exercise after two days on the road.

The local council were obviously trying to spruce-up the shopping area and there were lots of roadworks & diversions. The bits that had been completed were very nice, and some of the residential areas on the outskirts also looked clean & tidy with well-kept houses and gardens. As a railway town there were occasional freight trains passing through hauling a couple of hundred wagons, each loaded with two 53’ shipping containers, stacked one on top of the other. Thankfully, they either didn’t run at night or were quiet enough not to wake me up!

On my second day there, the lack-of-exercise issue was resolved with a visit to the local Cascades Conservation Area which comprised a large area of woodland with hiking trails and a series of rapids. A very peaceful place with only a few local dog-walkers for company.

Still heading west we enter Manitoba, its capital city being Winnipeg. It looked like any typical North American city, modern with a downtown area dominated by tall corporate skyscrapers. As it was a Sunday when I visited, the office buildings were all closed and therefore all the local businesses which supported the staff from those offices were also shut.

The two main tourist attractions were the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, housed a large and ostentatious building with many EV chargers in the car park, and the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada. You can probably guess which one I chose….

The exhibits ranged from old bush planes and passenger aircraft to cold war-era jet fighters.

Heading ever further westwards, the next stop was Regina in Saskatchewan.  I had imagined that Saskatchewan would just be a series of giant cornfields, which may be the case in the northern part of the province, but the part I was in, bordering and to the south of the Trans-Canada Highway, had rolling hills and surprisingly small fields, sculpted by the contours of the landscape. The crops were predominantly grain, of course, most of which had already been harvested but there were a few fields (possibly of barley) still standing, awaiting the combines & tractors. Regina itself looked very similar to Winnipeg. There were a couple of nice city-centre parks, filled with people sitting in the sun eating the lunch that they had just bought from the ubiquitous Tim Hortons branches dotted around, but nothing particularly noteworthy.

The next day, there was to be a change of direction towards the US border to visit a couple of American National Parks for a few days. When looking at the map, I couldn’t help but notice that the route south took me quite close to the very small farming town of Verwood, SK, and was unable to resist a minor excursion to see if there were any churches which may be of interest to our own Dorset-based ecclesiastical antiquarian. As luck would have it, there were two, although both were in need of a good sandblasting followed by a couple of coats of Dulux.

The border crossing into Montana was very remote and almost appeared closed as I drove up to it. After sitting outside for a couple of minutes, a US border agent emerged, removed the two plastic traffic cones that had been impeding my progress and beckoned me to his drive-thru booth. Pleasant enough chap, although he hadn’t realised that it was possible to sail from the UK to New York (in fairness, he’d been posted at least a thousand miles from any ocean) until I reminded him it was the same route that the RMS Titanic & SS United States used to take.

With the formalities complete, I continued my journey, ending the day in Billings for an overnight stay enroute to the first US National Park on my list, a re-visit of one that enthralled me on my first ever visit to the United States 37 years previously. For those who haven’t already guessed which one, all will be revealed next week…
 

© Snotsicle 2025