Northern Ontario

My bus from Ottawa went through North Bay and then to Subury, where I had a layover of 2 hours. All I know about Sudbury I learned from Stompin' Tom Connor's song "Sudbury Saturday Night" and from hearing about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in physics classes. That, and I knew there was a big nickel because I'd seen it in a book I read about Ontario from my elementary school library. So I was pleased that we drove by the nickel on the way out of town, as that's mostly what I wanted to see (and I pondered why it is that people find miniature and larger versions of things to be neat, and would we do so if we didn't know the original size of the object?). The rock there is sometimes black, as is the soil, and from the mining that's gone on outside of town the earth is scraped bare for miles seemingly, although there was grass being planted as well.

Otherwise, northern Ontario roadsides looked a lot like New Brunswick with lakes - vegetation pretty much the same as PEI, and rockfaces sticking out like NB. In the first stretch after Ottawa I got to see the Laurentian Hills that graced all my pencil crayon packages as a kid.

Got into Thunder Bay in the morning after a not-as-comfortable night on the bus (Greyhound buses not as nice as Acadian's), dropped stuff off at hostel and went to see Old Fort William, a historical recreation of the original Northwest Company fur-trading post with people in costume acting out the roles of the people of that period (1815). I really enjoyed the visit; I like history afterall and that's not a period or a region that I know a whole lot about.

Going to go check out the shore of Lake Superior after this, with the tune of Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in my head.

I've posted photos in an album called Ontario (there's a few Maritimes at the start) in my photos 2 link (on the side of this page), but haven't had a chance to sort them yet or anything so might not be too clear where they're from.