Michele’s Musings

That last hour was spent in the dark, in the rain, in fog, avoiding moose…  I need a drink!

I forgot to mention yesterday that near Winnipeg we passed one of those solar cars on it’s treck from the US to Calgary, really cool!

 We left Dryden this morning ar 8:30, had a yummy breakfast at the hotel, would definitely recommend the Best Western Motor Inn, and they gave us $20 off for the 10 minutes of headache when we checked in :)  Between Ignace and Upsala we passed the Multi Faith Walk Against Violence heading west.  Then we hit construction (lots of it on the transcanada) and this is what you see passing you around a curve

If you think that is bad, imagine going up a hill to find one IN YOUR LANE coming AT YOU!  He barely made it back into his own lane, we had to slow down and get over onto the shoulder other wise he would have hit us.  Then James says “You should have taken a picture”  Well excuse me, I was a little busy freaking out and trying not to poop myself!  Then a bit further down the road we see a sign that says “Can’t See, Don’t Pass”….. thanks for the tip. 

We stopped in Thunder Bay at 1:30 for lunch, then hit the Wal-Mart so James could buy a cheap electric razor, apparently *I* forgot to pack it…. yup I’m sure that’s what happened…. The boys needed new sandels as well that we didn’t have time to shop for before we left and I needed a travel pillow, trying to stuff a regular pillow behind your head in the passenger seat just doesn’t work well.  Left Thunder Bay at 2:30, stopped a bit later at Pass Lake for gas ($145.9/L - $89) then headed to the Panorama Amethyst Mine for some digging fun!  Well we didn’t need to do much digging, they are just laying there for you to pick up!   All the purple stones below are amethysts.  You can buy them for $3/lb.  Picked up some souveniers as well

Kids and James poking for stones.

James and I with a scenic view behind us near the mines.

We left the mines covered in black fly bites at 4:30 and headed east.  At 6:15 we passed the Sea2Sea University of Lethbridge cyclists just before Schreiber.   Click the link for their blog.  We also ended up dining at the same restaurant in the town of Schreiber, saw them sitting as we were leaving. Back on the road at 7:30 and into Wawa Mystic Island Motel for 10:30, after a harrowing last 2 hours.  Today we saw on the side of the road, one young deer, one young black bear, one porcupine and 2 dead young moose.  Then in our harrowing last 2 hours we almost hit a young moose crossing the hwy, luckily it was still light out and it had started raining by then and James has slowed down (did I mention he drove ALL day today?) so we saw it and stopped in time.  Then it got dark…. and the rain started coming down harder…. and the fog rolled in…. did I mention it was harrowing????  But we are here safe and sound.  To finish off tonight here are a couple of fun pictures I took.  I probably won’t be able to update until next week but we’ll see how it goes!

Who knew we had a lake? This is slightly north of White River ON.

Blue skies….smiling at me….

That’s a very long road…. and only 1000 or so km left!

Keely in our rustic motel room, it’s quite nice.

The whole famdamily in the funny mirror in the roof.

ETA ….Found another pic, the boys sleeping in the van.

And I want to mention that the kids are behaving really well!  I thought maybe there would be a lot of fighting and whining, but there has been very little.  And Arran has done well entertaining the other two in the back, without any prompting from us even!  Rowan is being his usual Rowan self, but settles down when we remind him to.

Off to TO!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Holiday's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.