These next two pictures were taken along the road - the dirt became very red.
This is the remains of the Dorion Inn. It is particularly memorable in my family because Mom, Dad and Lisa stayed here when we had a family vacation to the west coast eleven years ago. At that time it was reportedly a reasonable hotel, except for the fact that there was a train track about 10 feet away from the rear wall of the building. As the story is told, no one got much sleep that night as trains went by quite frequently through the entire night.
Anyways, about 2 years ago when Lisa moved to Vancouver, they drove past the inn again and were surprised to see it had burned down sometime in the intervening years. There's been no improvements since.
We continued our journey and met this roadblock!
We had no idea why the road was closed, no idea how long it would be closed and there simply are no alternate routes. So we waited. We only waited about 15 minutes and then we were allowed to continue. We saw later that the road had been closed because an oversized load had to make a turn.
Our first stop was at Ouiment Canyon Provincial Park. It was raining so we debated whether or not to make the trek out to the canyon, but in the end we did, and it was worth it. We had a big umbrella and it was not windy so we stayed quite dry.
The literature at the canyon advertises it as being 1000 km deep. This is quite clearly not true - it is only about 1 km deep. I think the signage is trying to say that the vegetation at the bottom of the canyon is the same as vegetation 1000km north from the location of the canyon. But it is very confusing and probably has many visitors scratching their heads.
We did not make any stops in Thunder Bay itself, but we drove around the city on the freeways. We did go to the Thunder Oaks Cheese Factory. They weren't making cheese, but we could see that they did. But we stocked up on droppies and some stroop waffles. :)
The cheese farm was in the country so we took some more country roads to get to Kakabeka Falls, where we planned to stay that night. We had not seen farmland for a number of days.
At Kakebeka Falls, we could again pick our campsite and we chose the nicest site in the whole park! At least that's what the clerk at the desk said, and we were inclined to agree. It was a very private site, the only site on a little road. Not only that, in the entire loop of about 30 sites, there were only one or two other sites occupied. It was a very quiet night. The falls are also beautiful (pictures below) but the showers were simply dreadful. First, I was greeted by a mouldy shower curtain. Then, when I turned the water on (a push button) it only stayed on for about 10 seconds. I thought that couldn't possibly be right, so I tried again, and made sure I pushed the button good and hard. Nope, 10 seconds later it stopped again. 10 seconds! Oh, and the water was cold too!
As an aside, apparently there is another shower building at Kakabeka with nicer showers. I was glad to learn that, because one of my thoughts during the 10 seconds intervals was about Rich & Cher & kids preparing for church when Rich had an exchange with them recently! :)
Kakabeka Falls is called Niagara of the North, and it is indeed very beautiful. There is not nearly the volume of water as at Niagara but the water drops several levels and it was gorgeous. We have seen other pictures with more water going over, so perhaps that is during the Spring.
We took a lot of pictures at Kakabeka Falls, I'm hoping to get one blown up onto canvas to hang in our home. The hard part will be chosing which one!
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