7/10 - Thunder Bay, Ontario

Today we drove 46 miles up the coast highway to Thunder Bay, Ontario.  Crossing the border was easy going both ways, although we were asked a lot more questions coming back into Minnesota.  The U.S. border guards were a whole lot nosier than the Canadian guard, wanting to know where we lived, where we were staying, how long we were going to be there, where we’d been, why we came to Grand Portage.  Some of it might have just been ordinary curiosity rather than professional nosiness.   Maybe people don’t try to smuggle stuff into Canada, although with Canada’s price of fuel it would be profitable to smuggle gas and diesel if there was a way to do it.  The fuel prices we saw were around $4.40 per gallon for gas and $4.75 per gallon for diesel.  We’ll have to keep that in mind the next time we want to complain about our fuel prices.

The very nice and very empty border check point going into Ontario.

The countryside all the way from the border up to Thunder Bay is beautiful.  The road curves inland so there’s room for farms between the lakeshore mountains and the rocky cliffs just to the north.  The evergreens along the highway were spectacular but unfortunately I couldn’t get a picture of them. 

Gorgeous green fields with the Lakeshore mountains behind them.

We drove up Mount McKay to the overlook about half way up where the road ends.  There were trails leaving the parking lot so hardier souls were probably trudging up to the top.  

Mount McKay has spectacular views of the Thunder Bay area.  There was a blanket of something over the city and coastline which made it impossible to get a clear picture.  We haven’t had TV reception since we’ve been here so we don’t know if smoke from the Saskatchewan fires is contributing to this haze or if it’s air pollution.  Or maybe it’s from the fog which frequently forms on the lake which you can barely see in the picture.  It’s at the edge of the horizon hidden in the blanket.  It was unusually hot in Thunder Bay today….85 degrees vs 78 in Grand Portage….so a fog bank would be a definite possibility.  

I’ve borrowed a good picture from Wikipedia (below) to give a better idea of what the city looks like.  It has a population of around 110,000 people but doesn’t look that big.  It’s a big shipping hub for grain being moved from western Canada to the East Coast via the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway.  

We didn’t get to see as much of the area as we’d hoped.  There was a lot of traffic and by the time we finally found a place to eat and got through lunch we didn’t want to go further into town and get tangled up in worse traffic.  The part we saw wasn’t attractive but one can hardly get a good idea of a city from seeing only a few miles along one of its busiest highways.   

Tomorrow we’re heading for Michigan, planning to spend the night in the town park in Bruce Crossing.  We’ll continue to Grand Marais on Sunday.  It’s 500 miles from here on the opposite side of Lake Superior, much too far for us to go in a day.  We’ve never stayed in a town park before so this will be a new experience.  They don’t take reservations so we’ll just have to hope their eight spaces aren’t all occupied.