Northern Ontario, Northern Route
2011/09/20
Despite the heat and noise in my crummy hotel room last night, I did somehow manage to get some sleep.
In the morning I dropped by Timmins’s Shania Twain Centre, which is also the access point for the gold mine tours. As feared, there were no tours running today, but the attendant did nicely allow me to roam around the site and photograph the old mining machines. I love this kind of stuff:
I then backtracked yesterday’s route for about half an hour because I wanted to check out some land near Nellie Lake that I had seen advertised in Dignam’s. It’s not a bad area if you want privacy, yet it’s less than an hour’s drive from two airports. The landscape is a bit flat for my taste though, and most properties for sale in this area do not include mineral rights.
Continued on from there along highway 11, the northern route around Lake Superior. I’ve never been this way before, and wanted to check it out. It continues to be very flat and monotonous – not really my preference in landscapes, though the thick coniferous forest is rather nice.
I passed a lot of historical points of interest along the way, but only stopped at a couple. Here’s today’s:
Passed through Kapuskasing, which as I recall has a special place in Canadian culture. Something about snake hips if I remember right. Ah, here it is. Anyway, the town is bigger than I expected – population nearly 10,000.
Thinking about Kapusasing and about Timmins’ fascination with Shania Twain, I suspect there is a trend towards notable talent coming from small towns or the countryside in Canada, and it would make sense because typically developing artistic talent is the only non-self-destructive way to spend your leisure time in such places.
Stopped at Hearst for the night – I would have preferred to get a few more miles in since it’s still a very long way to Thunder Bay, but this is the last civilized stopping point until nearly Thunder Bay itself. So, short day today, long day tomorrow – can’t be helped. I do like the northern Ontario landscape, but it’s a pain to travel through if, like me, you’re picky about where you sleep.
The Hearst tourist bureau had this amusing roadside giant tableau:
There’s something just a bit wrong with the wolves’ eyes.
The building design is amusing too:
As it turns out, this is a sawmill town. Lookit all those logs:
And somebody here is making money – I saw lots of new houses on the way into town, and some of them were very large.
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