September 10 - Drive to Sudbury, Ontario

Possibly as a result of Late Night Playwright Syndrome (usually called by its acronym, LNPS, pronounced "Limps"), we slept in a bit late. Taking a morning shower also slowed us up a bit, and I cooked pancakes for breakfast (I'm a slow cook), so we didn't get on the road until 10 a.m. Still, I figured we would be OK because we just wanted to relocate about 280 kilometers east to a campsite just outside Sudbury, Ontario, where we planned to walk a Volksmarch on Saturday. That turned out to be correct as it took us only about 5 hours with a stop at Tim Horton's for lunch.

Tim Horton's is a quintessentially Canadian chain of fast food stores. We both had the sandwich and soup combo specials. Monika had egg salad on a medium sized submarine bun with chicken noodle soup and coffee while I had a large roast beef submarine sandwich with split pea soup and fresh brewed tea! We ate with real silverware, metal plates, and ceramic soup bowls, which was a welcome change from plastic, plastic, and more plastic in a typical U.S. fast food joint. We also had a good view out over a bay leading into Lake Huron while we ate and that was just downright relaxing.

The rest of the drive was also scenic and, on the whole, relaxing. That is, most of the time we were just watching a shifting mix of woods, muskeg, and farms roll by our windows. The farms at this latitude in Ontario (from Sault St. Marie to Sudbury) seemed to be just for hay and fodder; I didn't see any evidence of row crops and I surmised that the soil was too poor. The only tense moments in the drive came when the cheerful Canucks went booming by us in the no passing zones on the 2 lane stretches of Canada 17, often with a trailer in tow or a couple of canoes loosely strapped to the top. That was unnerving when it happened, but occurred so often that I concluded the Canadians take the double yellow lines as advisory rather than as absolute prohibitions of passing. Passing in no passing zones is rare in the U.S. and unheard of in Germany, so this was just something I could not really get used to.

We put up for the day shortly after 3:00 p.m. in Carol's Campground on the shores of a small lake, where the proprietor had a French lilt to her English. It mixed pretty well with Monika's German accent, so we got along fine and were shortly ensconced on campsite 25 for two nights. We set up the awning to have some shade for the afternoon and to dry it out after all the rains we had experienced en route, and sat in our camp chairs to while away the afternoon hours with a view out over the lake. Monika crocheted while I brought the journal up to date and we both munched on wild blueberries we had purchased from a lady selling from her car just across the street from the campground. She and her siblings actually picked the berries locally and then they took turns sitting out at their roadside stand to sell them. The wild blueberries were, in my experience, noticeably smaller and perhaps a bit tastier than their domestic cousins. That afternoon was, I think, the kind of relaxing experience that most normal folks have when they go camping at a lake somewhere and probably good for the blood pressure.

The relaxed afternoon passed quietly into an equally relaxed evening, almost all of which was spent finishing the "Quantum Rose" book. We found it quite engrossing and the really great part for me was that she managed to write a complex and interesting story about believable people without a single person being killed throughout the entire book, as far as I can recall. It had other disasters aplenty including kidnapping, injuries, rape and rapine, but no killing and that was just fine with me. I'm so tired of the relentless killing in the real world that I really don't want to have it as part of my evening's entertainment. The book also concluded on an upbeat note, and that made it so much easier to get to sleep that night.