Halloo to the Soo

Tuesday, June 5
We're connected to the Net! Today was our first chance to log on, check our e-mails (thanks John and Johan), and post the first two days of the blog. How did we manage this? We’ve pulled in to a KOA Kampground with free wi-fi. It’s great – not just because of the net connection, although that is a great plus – but because it’s pretty, clean and quite close to Sault Ste. Marie. We had planned to go to Pancake Bay, but discovered it’s a good hour’s drive out of the city, which we’d have to do in reverse to continue on to the US of A, and we had some business to attend to in town.
The first thing that needed looking at was the trailer’s propane fridge. We’ve never used that power source for it, and the instruction book told us to switch to propane on and off several times to prime the pump if it hadn’t been used in a long while. We did this several times with no result, so we wanted to ask an RV specialist to take a look. Boy, did we choose the right spot for that. Just down the highway from the campground was an RV service centre, and the guy dropped everything and followed us back to the site to see what the problem was.
Well, just like when you take your kid to the doctor about a cough and the kid stops coughing in the waiting room, the service man did what we had done half a dozen times before and poof! The propane kicked in. He smiled and said we had done all the work for him – no charge! And off he went. So now, when we get way out into the hinterland, we’ll be able to chill our food without need of electricity. (Mind you, when we get that far north, we could do that by stashing all the food in a snowdrift, but we’d rather not invite grizzlies for dinner!)
Our next service call was to a propane place to see about getting an attachment for our gas BBQ. We have been using small green disposable propane bombs for it up to now, but they are not environmentally friendly – in fact, the owner at Propane Depot where we stopped said soon there will be a five dollar surcharge for them when you buy them to pay for their safe disposal. So we wanted to be able to connect to a refillable propane tank instead – and we needed to buy a small one as well. Too bad, the owner said, they’d just had a sale and were fresh out of them. Val said, "we’d be happy to buy a used tank – any chance you’d have one?" Guess what the guy did? He sold us his own personal one for $15 – when a brand new one of the same size would have cost us $50. As Val said, a beat-up tank looks less attractive to steal, so this suits us just fine.
We’ve taken a bit of a look around town and have decided to spend a couple of days here. Our trip from Chutes to the Soo was quite short, but we saw Manitoulin Island to our left and passed quite a few Aboriginal communities. There are fewer pine trees and more deciduous ones, and quite a bit of farmland as well. It was quite cool still but at least today we saw some sunshine. I swear the little white things that drifted past our window when we woke up this morning at Chutes were snowflakes, but they might have been seed casings from the trees. It felt cold enough to be snow.
Val was forgiven for bypassing the Sudbury nickel when we stopped for lunch. We did way better than five cents’ worth – we pulled off at a parking area next to a little park and right in the middle was a giant loonie! Of course I had my picture taken next to it. If anyone doubted that the loonie was growing on the market these days, I can attest to the fact that one of them, anyway, is a good eight feet across. Just a bit too big for my change purse, but anyway. Tomorrow we’ll tell you about the Soo.