September 6 - Drive to Neys Provincial Park, Ontario

Well, we had planned to drive that day eastward to Lake Superior Provincial Park, but it didn't work out that way. The wind was gusting and rain was coming down in sheets while we had breakfast, but it let off for a bit while we were packing and hitching the trailer, so we made the optimistic assumption that the weather would continue to improve. That turned out to be incorrect, but we were well on our way before that fact slowly dawned on us.

The driving conditions were simply terrible. We were on a twisting, up and down 2-lane highway, and the drainage in many spots was so bad that the standing water was over an inch deep, at which point the entire rig started to hydroplane, a very unsettling feeling. The gusting crosswinds were particularly irritating when the rig started to hydroplane as everything would slide over to the left (downwind or leeward) and that was very difficult to control. With an articulated rig like ours, I found that the end of a skid could be very different depending on which set of wheels regained contact with the pavement first, so I could not prepare to take any specific corrective action. I had the anti-sway damper cranked down to maximum, and that helped, but the rig would still lurch to the left whenever a gust off the lake hit us. Very tense driving, to say the least.

As soon as we climbed 100 feet or more about the roughly 600 foot Mean Sea Level lake shoreline, the fog closed in, and the higher we went the thicker the fog became. When the visibility dropped down to about 50 feet, I slowed down to 40 or 45 mph and put on the flashers, hoping that both oncoming and overtaking traffic could see me better that way. Most of the passenger car drivers also appeared to moderate their speeds in the fog, but much to my consternation the tractor trailers did not. They kept coming up on me at 90-100 kilometers per hour and passing on the left. That was nerve wracking enough when we had an uphill grade and there was a passing lane for the truck to use, but on flat stretches with oncoming traffic in the left lane it became much worse. The coup de gras was when a truck roared by me in the fog in a double yellow line no passing zone where neither of us could see more than 100 feet ahead and neither of us had an escape route if oncoming traffic had appeared. I decided that the driving situation had crossed the line into Distinctly Dangerous. If I slowed up to what I considered a safe speed in the fog, these semis would be coming up on me at a speed differential of at least 40 kph and could jolly well rear end me. If I sped up enough to avoid that happening, I would be in danger of rear-ending anyone foolish enough to stop ahead of me, and that was equally unpalatable. After all, we were out here to see Canada and have some fun, and this driving was definitely Not Fun.

Monika suggested we could pull into the next Provincial Park that was, by this time, just a few more miles up the road, and I wearily agreed. The Province of Ontario seems to have set up parks roughly every 100 miles around Lake Superior, which means that you are never too far away from one as distances go in Canada. So as it turned out we spent yet another night camped on the beach right beside Lake Superior, but this time it was Neys Park. The rain gradually cleared off during the afternoon, but the winds continued very strong and gusty so we just had lunch and worked on the the computers for a while. We were parked more tail into the wind rather than head into the wind, so the trailer wiggled a bit more in the gusts than at our previous campsite, but it was stable enough to be able to work and sleep OK.

While I took a nap, Monika worked on the computer as another squall line came up and hit the campsite. The winds were howling and rattling the stove vent flap that she had opened to cook lunch and it bothered Monika enough that she braved the elements to fasten it back down. After all, she thought, it would "only take a second" and what could go wrong? First she had to get out of the trailer without having the door being ripped out of her hand by the wind. After she was outside and had slammed the door, she had to dash around the trailer without being blown away and then fasten the vent flap which of course took much longer than it would have if it wasn't flapping all over the place. Finally she had to get back into the trailer without the door being torn out of her hands once again. She persevered, but by the time she slammed the door shut again at last, she was absolutely drenched. In any case, the vent flap was quiet and I, of course, was still blissfully snoring away, oblivious to her short and very wet adventure.

I should mention that the beach at Neys Park was completely different from the beach at Rainbow Falls Park. The Neys beach was a deep, soft sand extending for at least a kilometer along the edge of Lake Superior. When we visited, the beach was covered in driftwood of almost every size and shape. Park regulations prohibited using driftwood as firewood, but whether that was out of some ecological ground or simply to protect the firewood sales of the camp store I had no idea.

That evening the sky gradually cleared and the wind decreased while we walked along the beach, but it was still windy and cold enough that we were still quickly chilled and retreated to the trailer. Dinner was Gumbob (see the secret recipe in Wanderung 1), and it brought back memories of camping in Florida.

Being shutterbugs, we were hoping for the weather to clear a bit so that we would have a spectacular sunset and that is luckily what we got. About a half an hour before the sun dropped below the headland to the west of the cove upon which our beach was situated, we traipsed down to the beach and started taking pictures. I was particularly intrigued by the pieces of driftwood that were half in and half out of the water. The patterns of golden sunlight reflecting in the wet sand or water swirling around these graceful objects was, to me, stunningly pretty.

The camera batteries went low, however, so we had to make a quick detour back to the trailer to drop in another set and change the chip, which was also getting full. We tried taking some panoramic type shots as well as the close ups of driftwood. For a while we resisted the urge to take pieces of driftwood and "pose" them where they would look the best, but Monika finally grabbed a piece that look kind of like praying mantis (4 long spindly legs, two knobby eyes, and otherwise a rather stick like body, since it was, after all, a piece of wood!) and plopped it down at the water's edge.

Almost all of the other pieces of driftwood rather patiently waited for us to take their pictures. But there was one piece that was getting sucked further and further into the lake with each wave while we were trying to take its picture, tempting us to come closer and get our feet wet. Taking pictures in between waves kept us quite literally on our toes for the next few minutes. Besides, it was all quite entertaining and a nice way to end the day.

After the show was over we spent the rest of the evening in the trailer, adding music back into our evening entertainment mix. We could receive only 2 FM stations and 1 AM station on the radio and none of those was very appealing, so we had to make our own music. First Monika played the dulcimer while I edited Wanderung 6, then I played the dulcimer while she downloaded and turned the pictures. Until I could find the time to build another dulcimer from a kit, we were limited to taking turns on Monika's dulcimer. Since these dulcimers are musically related to bagpipes, perhaps it is just as well that we could only have one of us play at a time or else we would have had sounded like "dueling bagpipes" which would probably have been almost as bad as dueling banjos!