September 15 - Volksmarch in North Bay, Ontario

As you might expect, we were both groggy from lack of sleep and after making some really elementary errors like walking in the wrong direction to get to the bathrooms, we decided to be very careful and take "baby steps" for the rest of the day. As neither of us was in any shape to drive the rig, we signed up for another night at the campground and drove (carefully and slowly) into North Bay for the walk there. The starting point was a "Country Style Donut", a coffee and doughnut shop across from a big old church built from large stone blocks, and there we had coffee (Monika) and a doughnut (Bob) to try to get ourselves going. The coffee shop had smoking and non-smoking sections clearly divided by a glass wall, and I noted that there were far more people in the smoking section. In the U.S., in contrast, where we still encounter this type of division we usually find more people in the non-smoking section. It appeared to me that Canada was still much earlier in the process of de-smoking their country, somewhere about where the U.S. was 10 years ago, but given how many of my friends and relatives smoking has killed or injured, I certainly wished them the best of luck in shifting over to a predominantly non-smoking society.

From the coffee shop our route was a 1 block jog over to Main Street where we turned left. Main Street was clearly the old commercial center of town, and we both felt that it was a nice, economically and socially active district. I saw about 5 or 6 vacant storefronts, but at least 2 or 3 of those had signs stating that they were being redeveloped for new businesses that would be opening in the near future, which I took to be a good omen. Again there were more people just out and walking about than I would have expected to see in an old downtown section in a typical U.S. city, many of which feel like modern day ghost towns. We managed to not buy anything at a couple of antique stores that had really intriguing goods and at a used book store despite the sidewalk sale of books for $5 a bag! If we had not have had another 2 hours to walk and carry the bag, we probably would have broken down and bought some. Interestingly, all the used books we saw for sale were English, so maybe North Bay is still a Predominantly English area, or maybe the French Canadians keep their books!

The sun was beating down and our walk became progressively hotter as we crossed over a railroad yard to a section of town that had a commercial strip but was otherwise residential. On the commercial strip we encountered a Tim Horton's that had a simply gorgeous flower garden out in front. I mean somebody had to invest at least some time, some money, and quite a bit of effort to have such an extensive flower garden between the restaurant and the road. Some of the flowers I recognized like Indian Paintbrush, but some I could not like the purple spikes of flowers thing, which was frustrating. In the states, I would have never expected an extensive flower garden in front of a fast food joint, but somehow it seemed to fit in Canada.

Shortly thereafter we were supposed to turn right on MacDonald Street, and Monika kept saying "Right on MacDonald" while I, fixated on the McDonalds restaurant a block down the street, blissfully and obliviously continued to walk straight ahead toward what I thought was our goal. It was that kind of day, I guess, and definitely NOT the kind of day where I would want to be flying an airplane! Monika finally got through to me and we turned right on MacDonald to start curling back toward the downtown area. It was nice to get off the main drag and have shady, tree-lined streets to walk along. We returned to a pleasant little park with a "Gateway to the North" arch in it plus an old jet fighter plane mounted on a pedestal to commemorate Canada's participation in the North Atlantic defense system.

The best part of the walk was a 3-4 kilometer stretch from the park back through the middle of town along a promenade on the shore of Lake Nippissing. We had great views of the lake, of course, and some nice beach areas, but a wind was blowing off the lake and it was at least 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) cooler than on the city streets. The promenade had small park areas here and there with lots of flowers and some park benches where we could park our derrieres and rest a bit.

Near the downtown area we passed a rather large marina populated with mostly small powerboats. An old excursion boat had been permanently docked at the shore as a restaurant, and further on I think we saw the newer Catamaran-hulled excursion boat preparing to leave for a trip around the lake. It looked like fun, but we wanted to finish the walk so we continued until the promenade turned into a path and finally ended on the northern side of the city center.

Reluctantly leaving the lakeshore with its cool breezes, we plunged back inland. Fortunately the Volksmarch route was once again along some pleasant residential streets with intermittent shade, so we didn't bake but it was plenty warm. Many of the homes had flowers here and there, and one big old brick house with a large 2-story portico looked to me like some kind of a mansion from the old days.

We saw the old church that was across from our finish point and wrapped up our walk of North Bay feeling hot but otherwise in fine fettle. There were supposed to be options for longer 15 and 20 kilometer extensions of the basic 10 kilometer walk, but our page of instructions did not include those sections on the back. It was probably just as well that we were not tempted to do a longer walk as the day was heating up quickly enough that another hour or two of walking in the city could have become hot and miserable. We liked the city of North Bay, and certainly the walk was cheap as we only paid $1 Canadian for each of us. If you were trying to maximize the kilometers walked per buck, taking the North Bay 20 kilometer option would only cost you about 80 cents U.S., which is a heckuva deal for the budget conscious.

Along budgetary lines, we found that we were spending about $68 U.S. per day on the average in Canada, which was noticeably less than our average for Wanderung 6, which was $75 U.S. Partly we were simply driving fewer miles on average per day, but also that was no doubt partly due to cooking most of our noon meals in the trailer. We excluded the cost of my medical excursions and replacing trailer tires from both averages as these are things that (hopefully!) will not happen to other folks taking trips like these.

Curiously enough, we may have unknowingly crossed paths with my brother while in North Bay. Since he had started east from Moosomin, Saskatchewan, a full 2 weeks earlier than our arrival in Canada, I confidently expected him to be through Ontario and rambling about in Quebec someplace. However, he was traveling slowly to begin with and then had the engine in his VW camper blow up in North Bay. So he stayed there for a week or so having his engine replaced and might have overlapped with us. But each of us was using our cell phones as little as possible to save roaming charges, and as a result we passed rather like ships in the night, as it were.

Not having the faintest idea that my brother was around, we stopped off at the Tim Horton's with the nice flower bed for lunch (the chili combo was quite delicious), and then turned in for a Supernap to try to catch up on our sleep. That helped, and after some showers we felt awake enough to have a light supper, go out shopping for some basic groceries, and spend most of the evening working on processing our pictures (Monika) or writing the journal (Bob). For the shank end of the evening we played tag team with the dulcimer. First Monika played and sang while I used Baby to read up through chapter 50 in Mark Twain's "Roughing It". Then I took over with playing (awkwardly) and singing (absently) through some of my favorite songs while Monika reread the Asaro book. It was a very pleasant way to end the evening.