Lake Superior and Secret Doors

September 12, 2007

I’m writing from Pam Johnson’s place (used to be Wimberley) in Regina, Saskatchewan. I keep getting hypnotized watching telly. They just aired a segment on eye laser surgery. Hmmm.

Anyway, I’m trying to to a bit of catchup, so I can move along more smartly, though I’m getting to a phase where I’ll be staying at people’s houses a bit more (until I visit my brother in Gold Beach, Oregon, when I will be staying about a week).

So, back to September 9th. From Wawa, it was a beautiful drive down Route 17, taking the long way around the Great Lakes. I did see more inuksuit and decided to branch out in my picture taking to get a shot of Lake Superior, though I wasn't always near enough.

I moved on to a small town the other side of Thunder Bay (which had a population of 110,000 -- amazingly enough to me and too big for me to want to stop, plus being off the road), called Ignace (population 1,700). I almost ran out of gas again. Seems I have to fill up when the tank gets to half empty. The distances between "towns" (and that's possibly being generous) is too great. It did start raining a bit, but not as bad as on the way to Wawa, when it poured buckets. 

For a good idea of how the road looked, I spotted a bit of a rainbow behind a big rig, as I cruised off the Canadian "shield" -- a pre-Cambrian, huge patch of rock that covers most of Ontario, Quebec, the northern parts of Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

I ended up staying at the Lone Pine Motel on Lake Agimac (believe it or not there’s more than 56,000 listings in Google for this motel).

It was a wonderful old motel built by the proprietor's father, who also made all the furniture. It had some interesting features (besides, of course, no wireless nor cell access). It was a classic vacation spot, where each room had access to a little bit of beach and a few comfortable
beach chairs.

Each room had an interesting feature of two little back-to-back doors that you could use to unload your luggage from your car, which had to be parked behind your room, so as not to obstruct the lake view.