Northern Ontario to Southern Ontario

Now the Yukon was something we expected to be remote and difficult to get to. But this time, we weren't going to the Yukon, we were going to Thunder Bay and over Lake Superior. Turns out the drive time is the same. Northern Ontario is a crazy remote place, with lots of nothing, and lots of space. I know space is something, but lets not get too philosophical here. Thunder Bay is sort of like the event horizon for Northern Ontario's proverbial black hole. The Bay is a great place actually, although somebody 50 years ago in the city planning commission deserves a bullet in the head. The whole waterfront is industrial land, and most of it unused. There is access only in a couple of places, and it's in the spots where fun is in scant supply. They should re-vamp their ancient industrial complex (whose replacement is 200m away and looks the same) into a park of some sort, or some useful structure, instead of allowing it to remain the bane of the beach as it is. We only stopped there a day, came in the morning, left early evening, but I still had a good feeling about the city. We visited the Hoito, which is basically a Thunder Bay breakfast institution. A little background on why and how this place exists is that there are lots of Finnish people in Thunder Bay. That is all I know. The have a big Finnish population, hence lots of Finnish restaurants, including this one, in the basement of the Finnish cultural center. The restaurant has the mandate to provide cheap and tasty Scandinavian food for the masses, and it does it extremely well. We not only had awesome pancakes, which are the house specialty, but also a rye bread and rice pasty with warm egg salad on top, which was damn delicious. I forget the name, but online they call them Karelian pastries. Tasty stuff. The meal was pretty cheap, and the pancakes were also good enough not to complain. Afterwards we made the conclusion to push East, in order to keep up with schedule, which has since turned into a farce, but nevertheless, at the time, was important. We did this in spite of an invitation from a friend of mine to visit her cottage near Thunder Bay, so you can imagine it wasn't an easy decision.
Nevertheless, we visited the Terry Fox monument and set on our way, stopping only to eat some smoked goldeye fish, which was decent, but far from spectacular. This had nothing to do with our treatment of it, because we bought it as is, so ha. With the fish we had leftover bean salad, a nice green salad, more pickled herring, onion relish, and our favorite, bannock. It was a light meal in terms of flavour, but I remember wanting to be unconcious after eating all of it. It was so filling and heavy in the stomach as to be unpleasant.
We kept going for a while and stopped at the Agawa petroglyphs, a series of native paintings on a rock right by the river. It's a bit of a precarious climb, so I did it without hesitation, other members of my party were more hesitant. Cough. They weren't really worth risking my life for, so I can't say much about it. You basically climb down onto a wet shelf to look at half drawings of imaginary creatures. Though their longevity is pretty impressive, it basically stops there. That was our last stop before sleep that evening, in some random small town along the way. Our first truck stop. No stories, sadly, it was a dark and uneventful evening.

We kept on keeping on until Sudbury the following day, where we prepared a simple dinner of rice, peas and sauteed mushrooms under the big nickel. Though it was a super simple and fast meal, it was tasty, and the location was pretty decent. The nickel is actually somewhat of a disappointment, being constructed not of one piece, but actually many pieces of stainless steel. The effect of the multiple pieces is patchwork and looks almost, dare I say it, unprofessional? I realize logistics aren't easy when making a massive replica of a coin, but I felt the execution was poor. After Sudbury we rolled down the coast quickly to Wasaga beach. Though I didn't know it, I remembered immediately that I had been here as a child. I remember feeling weird about how trashy it was. I felt the same way this time around. Not only is it full of tourists and Torontonians (who I have nothing against), it's so packed that it's bordering on claustrophobia. The water actually feels a slight artificially warm because it's clogged with people. Gross I'm aware. There was also some kind of bacterial scare recently, so double bonus extra fun was in effect. Don't swallow the water!

All jokes aside, the beach was mediocre, but a nice refresher. We drove from there straight through to Guelph, stopping only to get snack supplies from the local Foodland. We pulled up at the Meron family homestead late that evening, and my beard received it's due gasps. I haven't seen Greg since I left Vancouver this most recent time, but after living together for a long time, that's kind of like losing a limb or something similar but not so difficult to remove. We get along like a house on fire, it's almost an issue. We hung around that night, enjoyed the company of his family, and relaxed. The following day we played some Frisbee in the yard, where Howie demonstrated his prowess with the disc. After that we moved downtown for a wander about, visited a brewery that doesn't give tours, therefore doesn't get me to drink it's beer, and jammed. One shop we found extremely interesting was Ouderkirk and Taylor. It's a small downtown Guelph cheese shop, host to mainly local cheeses, but also a variety of produce from the area, especially specialty food items. They have a mass of locally made jellies, meats, vinegars, oils, and other specialty Canadian stuff. We bought a pack of Red Fife wheat flour, which is a dense wheat native to Canada, and was a staple product until industrial agriculture edged it out with GMO's. It has recently had a renaissance since the local food movement caught on, and sells more and more every year. It's a landrace variety, which means not only that it grows well in a variety of conditions, but there is genetic variability within the strain of wheat itself. In any case, it makes for awesome flour, though ideas are scant as what we can do with it on the road. From a recommendation by Katie, the lovely young lady in Ouderkirk and Taylor, we decided the next day to visit Monforte cheese in Straford, which is a bit of a backtrack, but no big deal. Wrong. Huge deal, huge awesome deal. The saga continues.