In my writings, I used to make fun of people who constantly needed to be connected to cell service. “Cellaholics” I called them.
Well, we just went through four days of cellular withdrawal and it was painful. We were camped at Dinosaur Provincial Park, deep in the hinterlands east of Calgary. Only if we drove to high ground could we could get one bar of cell coverage. It was enough to allow Dianne to make a garbled call to her mom, but otherwise worthless.
The park did offer free Wi-Fi, but at 0.06 mbs, it was only slightly faster than my dinosaur-era AOL dial-up service. Downloading e-mails took longer than an extra-innings baseball game.
We’re now in Regina, camped in an RV park where we have a full three bars of cell coverage and in-park Wi-Fi. “Be patient,” the check-in clerk advised. “It’s not high speed.”
I measured it at around three mbs, which compared to the prehistoric speed at Dinosaur, seems positively fast. We’ve reentered the 21st century.
Just as with the plains states of the U.S., we assumed there would be little of interest in the prairie provinces of Canada. But we’re finding our drive through the flatlands to be quite delightful. I can put the Xterra in sixth gear, engage cruise control and sip coffee as we motor past huge fields of yellow-green canola blossoms.
I’m as happy as a trucker with a tailwind until my honey says she wants to stop and get a photo of the plants.
We’re now in Manitoba, camped at Riding Mountain National Park. The first question I asked at the Visitor Centre was “where’s the mountain?”
The young lady admitted there was no “mountain.” When settlers came into the area, the higher grounds here made them think they were in the mountains. No telling what they thought when they got to the Canadian Rockies in Alberta.
We live in Colorado. We’re not used to a lot of flying bugs. Sure, we have mosquitoes in the mountains and the Miller moths can occasionally be a problem around town in the spring, but other than yellowjackets wanting to share our backyard dinner, flying bugs are not a problem.
At home, when we wash the windshield at the gas station, it’s to remove dust, not splattered bugs. That’s not the case here in the prairie provinces of Canada, where the Nissan glass looks like it was bombarded by bug brigades on a suicide mission.
At our Riding Mountain National Park campsite, unless there’s a strong breeze blowing, the mosquitoes can be ravenous. Fortunately, we’ve got a screen on the trailer door and a screened-in enclosure to retreat to outside.
Yesterday we toured the park by car. Today was to be our hiking day. We chose a 14-kilometre out-and-back hike along Clear Lake, the park’s signature body of water.
The trail goes through the forest and we were soon accosted by swarms of fish flies. These sort of look like giant mosquitoes about one inch long. Thankfully, they don’t bite. But they love to fly in the face and land on clothes and packs where they take up residence.
We made about half our planned distance before turning around and retreating back to camp where we’ve got a screen on the trailer door and a screened-in enclosure outside.
Our next stop was Winnipeg. Sometime in the last century, I spent a couple of nights here after returning from a photo trip to shoot polar bears along Hudson Bay. The place has changed.
We camped at Birds Hill, a provincial park north of town. It’s named for a person, not the avian wildlife, and every year they hold a huge Folk Festival here. We arrived on closing day and got to hear the Barenaked Ladies (actually four males who definitely keep their clothes on) from our campsite.
One of our days here was dedicated to doing chores. We spent two+ hours getting a “15-minute express service” oil change at a local Nissan dealer. That was followed by a good four hours spent shopping for beer, wine, meat and other foods. Somewhere in there, laundry got done at the campground.
The other day was spent wandering around downtown Winnie. The town lies at an old trading post site near the junction of the Red and Assinboine Rivers. The place where the rivers meet, The Forks, is now a fascinating, national historic site filled with outdoor art, small shops and restaurants. As we wandered around, both Dianne and I said the same thing:
From Winnipeg, we crossed the remainder of Manitoba and entered Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. We’ll camp in a string of provincial parks until we get to Ottawa.
Our first stop was one night at a lakeside park a few kilometers from the Trans-Canada Highway. We checked in and drove to our nice wide, pull-through campsite, which came equipped with two picnic tables. A water spigot and large shower building lay a short walk away. So lay our electric hookup.
Ontario parks employ shared electric boxes where two adjacent sites use a common, twin outlet box. Our box stood in the bushes between our site and our distant neighbor’s.
Our trailer originally came with a skimpy 15-foot built-in cord for 30-amp hookups. I removed that cord long ago, replacing it with a marine-style input for which we carry a 30-foot connection cord. Here, fully extended, it reached about 2/3rds of the way from the outlet post to the trailer.
Fortunately, we carry a 25-foot regular extension cord with us, which we normally use to plug in our 12/120-volt, back-of-the-car cooler. Rigging the two together, we got power to the camper and only blew one of the box’s 15-amp circuit breakers.
Next stop was a three-night stay at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park along Lake Superior. The park lies near the end of a long peninsula, an hour’s drive from Thunder Bay. Our site lay along a dead-end dirt road, which meant precious little traffic.
We had a one-hole pit toilet nearby that was kept impeccably clean, mostly because with everybody else camped in bathroom-equipped trailers, we were the only ones using it. We had a pair of resident deer that would wander by camp, seemingly unafraid of us, a fox strode through camp on several occasions and we were greeted by a host of what I assume is Canada’s national bird – the mosquito.
We slathered ourselves in Deep Woods Off and tried to make sure that we kept the screen door to the trailer and the door to our screen shelter closed at all times. Still, every morning I would be awakened by a mosquito buzzing by my ear.
The park has a host of hiking trails of various lengths, some of which we actually hiked. We found that If we kept moving, the mosquitoes would stay away. Photo stops were brief at best. One evening, we drove to a hanging overlook to watch the sun set over Thunder Bay.
Near the end of the peninsula lies the former silver-mining community of Silver Islet. Today, it’s filled with summer cottages, some of which were formerly miners’ homes. We chatted with one resident, a 75-year-old man who winters in Florida. A staunch conservative, he repeatedly made the point that in Canada, health care is not “free.” It’s paid for out of tax revenue.
Well, so are roads, schools, police and fire protection. Paying for health care out of taxes means everybody’s covered.
We have one of those Apple iPods onto which we have recorded every album and song we own (and some that we don’t). When traveling, we put it into shuffle mode, never knowing what will come up. Cruising toward our next three-night stop at Lake Superior Provincial Park, the iPod decided to play Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
The ballad, which came out in 1976, tells the tale of a Great Lakes freighter that sunk on November 10, 1975. A line in the song goes, “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay if they’d put fifteen more miles behind ‘er.”
Whitefish Bay, we quickly found out, lies less than a two-hour drive from our campsite.
Unlike the Fitzgerald crew, we didn’t have to battle the “gales of November…in the face of a hurricane west wind” during our stay. In fact, we had three days of mostly sunny, calm weather.
We’re camped at Agawa Bay in a beautiful campsite sandwiched between Trans-Canada Highway 17 and a huge sandy beach that arcs for miles. As dusk approaches (which happens around 9:30), that beach fills with campers gawking at the sunset.
We’ve got a lovely campsite close to a water spigot and the washroom/showers. Mosquitoes are few and so are children, which means the campsite is quiet except for one thing – the highway.
We are perhaps 25 metres off Trans-Canada 17, which means the traffic noise is constant. And it’s not just cars and trucks. I think that every Harley Davidson motorcycle in Canada is doing laps down Highway 17. They come by singly and in packs, their patented muffler noise reverberating off the walls. Fortunately, our A-frame is made from fiberglass bonded to inch-thick Styrofoam, which provides a fair amount of sound insulation.
One day we hiked a bit of the Coastal Trail along the shoreline. As it meandered away from the water, it passed through a tick-infested jungle so thick that Tarzan would have looked for vines so he could swing above it.
Our other layover day was spent doing chores with a short break to go down to look at some pictographs painted by ancient First Nations people. Located a few feet above water level on shoreline cliffs, the paintings have endured the elements for around 400 years according to the young naturalist on duty.
“Amazing,” I told her. “I’m lucky if the paint on my house lasts 20 years!”
We’re now in our fifth province, so I think it’s safe to relate some observations about driving in Canada.
Roads
While we’ve logged hundreds of kilometres on divided highways, we’ve not seen a real interstate-style highway with controlled-access overpasses and onramps outside of the cities. Elsewhere, side roads intersect divided highways and traffic lights control intersections in towns along the way.
Most of the Trans-Canada Highways seem to be well paved and a joy to drive on. So are some of the major provincial highways, but not all. We’ve motored on some that were in desperate need of repair. Pavement was crumbling and previous asphalt patches were disintegrating. The result was tire-shredding potholes in unexpected places. In other words, it was like driving across Colorado, so we felt right at home.
One of the more noticeable things about the highways are how clean they are. Roadside trash is seldom seen. Frequent pullouts hold animal-resistant trash and recycling bins, and we’ve seen many folks stop to simply deposit their trash.
Drivers
One nice thing about Canadian drivers is there aren’t that many of them. There are fewer Canadians than there are Californians, and they’re spread across the second largest country on Earth. We’re not alone on most highways, but we’ve yet to see anything resembling a traffic jam.
Across the prairie provinces, most drivers seem to obey the speed limit. In British Columbia and Ontario, nobody goes the speed limit, not even grandmas driving white Buicks. In Ontario, it might be because the speed limit is 90 kilometers per hour. That’s roughly the same as the 55 mph we had in the states, and we know how few ever followed that.
One thing that sets Canadian drivers apart from American is that they know how to pass. In the states, I’ll have drivers tailgate me for miles, afraid to pass on even long, downhill straights with no oncoming traffic. Up here, drivers pull out and go around given even the slightest opening. No passing zones are treated as mere suggestions.
Truckin’
Compared to the United States, there seems to be far less semi-truck traffic on the highways, although we’re finding more as we head east. Our experience with truckers suggests they are a very courteous group. On steep hills, we’ve seen drivers pull onto the shoulder to let faster traffic by. That’s something never seen back home.
Rest areas
Along the Trans-Canada highways, it seems every province puts up a huge rest area-information center at the entrance to their province. Beyond that, the highways are peppered with small rest areas featuring picnic tables and pit-toilet washrooms. They’re generally quite clean and they come about every 30-50 miles, which is very handy for those of us who OD on coffee in the morning.
Gas stations
Plan ahead seems to be the rule up here. Small towns along the highway frequently don’t have gas stations and even in fair-sized communities, there may be only one or two. With the Nissan averaging under 15 miles per gallon, our comfortable cruising range is around 200-250 miles. Even when we’re not down too far, we’ll fill up in major towns.
Petrol is pricy up here. We’ve found prices ranging from $0.83-1.20 per litre, which is the equivalent of $3.14-4.54 per gallon. Even at the current exchange rate, those are California-gagging prices. On the plus side, we’ve hit a few stations where attendants pumped gas and cleaned windows for us. And so far, stations which don’t have pay-at-the-pump, credit-card readers don’t require prepayment.
I’ll have to admit that there are some disadvantages to camping in an A-frame versus a box trailer, especially when it rains as it did as we were departing Ontario’s Lake Superior Provincial Park.
Breaking camp, all our box-trailering neighbors had to do is raise their stabilizer jacks, hitch up the tow vehicle and take off. Everything inside stays nice and dry inside.
We, on the other hand, must drop our top.
It’s a well-established (alternative) fact that the fiberglass covering the roof and sides has been scientifically formulated to cause water beads to cling to it with the tenacity of lint on a wool skirt. Folded up and driven down the road, that clinging water is ready to soak everything inside the trailer.
We’ve found two ways to alleviate the problem. The preferred way is to camp in the desert where rain is as rare as a mosquito-free campsite in Canada.
The other is to remove the clinging water before collapsing the trailer. Unfortunately, reaching the top of the trailer would be impossible for even the tallest NBA player. So, we’ve gone to the next best thing.
We bought a squeegee with a collapsible 12-foot pole, which we store in a tube of two-inch ABS pipe bolted to the trailer bumper. Using the squeegee like a window washer on a high-rise, I can scrape water from the roof and sides before Dianne drops the top. A quick wipe with a terry towel does the rest. We still put tarps over the bed and dining rooms, but the volume of water that we need to mop up afterwards is minimal.
Departing the Lake Superior campground, we look at those in drenched tents and canvas-sided tent trailers. We’re glad we’re not those folks.
From Lake Superior, we headed east to what (after Banff) may be Canada’s best known park – Algonquin. Lying more than a day’s drive away, we planned an overnight stopover at a lakeside provincial park a few dozen kilometres north of the main highway.
A year ago, we invested in a Garmin GPS navigation system to help us get around. Overall, I’d say it has been one of the best investments we’ve made. I can’t imagine trying to make our way through Canada using AAA maps, especially when my copilot-navigator could be the reincarnation of Wrong Way Corrigan.
In addition to directing us down the correct paths, Garmie, as we call her, tells us how far we still have to go and when we will arrive. She tells us our speed in kilometres (something my speedometer barely does), tells us what the speed limit is on our current piece of roadway and advises us to upcoming speed limit changes, railroad crossings and animal crossings. She tells us how far to the nearest gas station, the nearest restaurant and most importantly, how far it is to the next rest area potty stop.
Garmie does have two distinct weaknesses, however. The first is that she seldom knows where campgrounds are located, especially Forest Service campgrounds in the States and obscure provincial park campgrounds up here in the Great White North. We often resort to having her to navigate to the nearest town and hope that we can find directional signs from there.
The other weakness is that Garmie does not know road conditions. She is programmed to put us on the “fastest” route and sometimes that can involve some pretty rough pavement.
Such was the case when she directed us to Fairbank Provincial Park, our overnight stop between Lake Superior and Algonquin. Following her instructions, we turned off the main highway in a don’t-blink-or-you’ll miss it-wayside community. People stared as we negotiated a series of bumpy, residential streets, wondering why trailer-pulling Americans were cruising past their homes.
We cleared town and wove our way through hilly woods and farm country on a semi-paved road buckled with frost heaves and pitted with potholes. Years of attempted patches made the pavement look as if it was covered in asphalt pancakes. Fortunately, nothing fell off the trailer and by opening them carefully, our first beers in camp only sprayed a little.
Returning to the main highway the next day, Garmie directed us down a well-paved, far smoother roadway. Of course, we could have come in this way, but it would have been farther and thus a longer drive. That’s not how Garmie is programmed.
