Boats and floats and Canada geese

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

No highway travel today – we decided to spend a day looking at Sault Ste. Marie. Val is charmed with the friendliness of the people here, and lumps them in with all other northern Ontarians, such as himself, as a breed apart. He’s right – everyone has been very pleasant!
Today we learned how the town got its name. "Sault" is an old French word for rapids, and the Ste. Marie part refers to the river that runs between Canada and the US. So now you know.
This morning we visited the Bushplane museum near the St. Mary’s River, and checked out float planes with rollover tanks on top of the pontoons that could deliver cascades of water onto forest fires. There were more than a dozen planes of various vintages in a huge hangar, as well as mock campsites, and some old Ford trucks and Model T’s. We had the small cinema all to ourselves as we sat in salvaged airplane seats to watch a video of early pilots, daredevil wing-walkers and brave firefighters. It was quite interesting and we would have spent more time there, but we had to get moving in order not to miss the boat that was next on our agenda.
The boat provided us a tour of the locks between Ontario and Michigan, where we saw some huge ocean-going vessels and actually were lifted from one level to the next in a lock designed for one of these. Our tour boat was so small we hardly occupied any space in the lock, but we were amazed at the speed at which the water churned up from conduits beneath us and floated us 21 feet up to the higher level. When we sailed through the open gates, we could see, far off to the right, Canada’s biggest wind farm with hundreds of huge white wind turbines. We could only see a few and they were just tiny on the horizon. We also sailed right up to the Algoma steel plant and saw the heaps of limestone and coal and other materials that go into the making of steel. We passed under the International Bridge which we will be taking tomorrow into the US. It was a terrific tour, and the guide explained everything really well.
Our next destination was to see the Pancake Bay campground that we had originally planned to stay at. It was a lovely drive of about an hour to the spot and we passed three beautiful, sandy beaches that stretched almost for miles by the side of the road – with not a soul on them (it was only about 13 degrees, so a bit cool for swimming). They must be popular places in the hot weather! Lake Superior was constantly on our left as we travelled to the park. There was lots of evidence of the Aboriginal communities in the area, with teepees by the road from time to time, and trading posts with wood carvings and moccasins for sale. We got to the campground and drove through it – it’s huge, with more than 400 sites, all arranged in rows parallel to the water’s edge. The beach reminded me of Sandbanks park, gentle and sandy and fringed with grass at the edge before you get to the trees. We were mosying down one of the narrow roads between the campsites and there we spied Farid and Georgette, the Swiss couple we met at Chutes! We knew they were camping there but in a campground that huge we figured it wasn’t that likely we’d come across them. So we had a brief chat and promised to look out for them in the Yukon when we get there!
Back to Sault Ste. Marie we drove and stopped for supper at our trailer. I remarked that we’d been gone three days and had yet to live up to the promise we had made to take a healthy walk each day, so after supper we went back to the river’s edge and trotted along its lovely boardwalk to redeem ourselves. There were dozens of great big Canada geese grazing in the grassy park next to the river, and we had to be careful not to step in goose poop as we headed back to the truck. I’d hate to be under one of those birds when they decided to let loose, let’s put it that way.
It was a fully packed day – I didn’t mention the couple of small shopping stops we made for bits and pieces – so we’ve earned our night’s rest tonight. Tomorrow we’ll break camp early and head to the US of A.