Apparition in the Mist

May 11, 2006
The cold that we woke to couldn’t be normal for the middle of May. We could see our breath. We heard that there had been a terrible freezing rain storm not too far away. As the morning drew on, the clouds cleared and the sun shone for a while but a cold wind still persevered.

On the advice of a business associate (thanks for the heads up Paul), we took Maggie in to an auto glass shop to have the chips repaired. They drove her into a large bay and slid the door down to warm up the glass; – otherwise, they couldn’t repair it. It was 2 ½ hours before it was complete at a cost of $110 – pretty good. They said there’s no guarantee it still won’t crack but it improves the odds 90%.

I blew a fuse for the power accessory outlet in the Honda. The old inverter that I use to power my laptop must be faulty because it blew a fuse in Maggie previously. Since then, I’ve used a new inverter in Maggie and kept the old one for the Honda but I’ll scrap the old one now. They sure don’t make it easy to change fuses – you have to be skinny as a rail and a contortionist to twist your body in beneath the steering wheel and you have to have the eyes of an eighteen year old to see what you’re doing. We gave up trying and drove into Canadian Tire and asked them to change it for us – and the guy was ‘skinny as a rail’ but he still struggled with it. Ten minutes later, all done and when we went in to pay “No Charge” we were told. Great Service!

It was still winter when we drove the long tedious highway 17 through Northern Ontario to Thunder Bay. Not a leaf was budding and the grass was brown. The scores of fishing and hunting resorts have signs posted “Closed for winter”. Rest areas, of which there are few, are barricaded. What a godforsaken land! We kept our eyes peeled along this stretch of road, hoping that a wildlife sighting might break the tedium – but there wasn’t a moose, or a coyote, or a rabbit or a mouse. Crows – that’s it. About 100 kilometres west of Thunder Bay is the geographic centre of mainland Canada, the point at which (going eastward) water flows down to the Atlantic. This also coincides with the time change to the Eastern zone.

On my last visit to Thunder Bay and Lake Superior, the vista was jaw-droppingly beautiful. It was July, 1970 and the glorious sun shone over the wave-crashing rocky shoreline. The vastness of lake Superior – really an inland sea – was realized by the clarity of the air. Not so this time. We were greeted with freezing rain, wind with close to hurricane force gusts and sombre grey skies. The ‘Sleeping Giant’, a promontory in the lake viewed from Thunder Bay, previously so awe-inspiring, now just a gloomy apparition in the mist.



Thank goodness Walmart put out the welcome mat and we hunkered down for the evening while we were battered by the storm. It was impossible to keep a satellite signal with the wind but fortunately we got ‘Survivor’ on a local station. We snuggled into our cozy fuzzy blankets on the couch with Caesar between us, of course.

My wifi connections have been erratic and not strong or solid enough to upload photos to my blog. I spent a couple of hours trying, always resulting in failure. I might have to enlist my ‘phantom assistant’.

Have you noticed it’s the little things that give the greatest satisfaction; it’s not the museums or ‘must-see’ sights. We find that we laugh easily over nothing, a sure sign of pleasure and contentment. Life on the road is so much more stimulating than life at home.