Rob-n-Hild, oot and aboot eh? Sorry - 2022

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Red Rock - Kapuskasing (515 km, driving time: 5 hours 52 minutes, max elevation: 388)

After a warm night in Red Rock we went back onto Route 17 just until we crossed the big bridge in Nipigon again, and then turned north on 11. Not only was this so we wouldn't drive the same road, but we also wanted to visit Kapuskasing as this is where our friend/colleague Carol comes from and we like visiting places like this.

On our way from Red Rock to Nipigon we tried to photograph the famous volcanic red rock set into the mountain. It was not easy to capture - so this is all we could manage.

People have been warning us for days that there is no gas on the road through Kapuskasing - we intended to fill up in Nipigon anyway - and it was made to seem like it was the outback, but it was actually one of the better roads in Ontario. There was one long stretch without filling stations - but only a couple of hundred kilometers so nothing drastic.

There were a lot of big trucks though and many of them were not prepared to stick to the speed limit (or the few km over it that we were doing) so there were quite a few overtaking manoeuvres that were a bit excessive!

As we passed through Beardmore, we spotted the World's Largest Snowman. Fun!

We did the usual lunch thing at a rest stop by Klotz Lake a bit earlier than usual (as it looked like a nice place) and as well as three dogs taking themselves for a walk (they were all tied together and daddy just dropped the lead while he sorted other stuff out!) there were some butterflies that appeared to be just hatching from their pupae. After some research online with the Georgian Bay Land Trust (Click for online report from GBLT.ORG), we learnt that it is more likely that the Tiger Swallowtails were congregating at drying mud puddles, extracting important minerals from the wet soil. Well now, we learn something new every day!

As we had lunch early, we then had a doughnut at Timmies in Hearst. We have fallen behind on our plant to test Timmies across Canada, but this one did have Canadian Maple doughnuts and steeped tea - although they could keep it hotter!

In Kapuskasing the motel is fun - as well as the door to the outside, where the car is parked, there is another door inside to a corridor running the length of the building. Maybe it is so you don't have to go outside in the winter?

We also had a lovely walk around Kapuskasing in the late afternoon.

We stopped here because of Carole, but it is also a convenient distance - and contrary to people who said there is nothing to see here, it has quite a fascinating story. The small local Ronald (Ron) Morel museum was closed, but there were many signs covering the history of the town. It started with an internment camp for immigrants from Eastern Europe during the first World War. Mostly Ukrainian men, they were housed in barracks and cleared a lot of land for an agricultural experimental station. Once the internees were paroled (by 1917 or so) it was used for some other detainees, but then many returning soldiers were given land here and a paper mill took over the region.

Kapuskasing boasts of being built as a planned town - rather like the garden cities in the UK. Which means that there is a really nice plan to the city with lots of space and some nice recreational areas. We walked through a park around the river - which is known as the local lovers lane - and then back through the town past municipal buildings and a nice church.

At Lover's Lane we posed for a photo as what appeared to be for weddings, but with some photo-editing we marked our upcoming wedding anniversary with our favourite thing: Tim Horton's tea/coffee!

There were even a lot of people around - something we remarked on as we seem to have been finding rather quiet towns of late (Fort Frances and Red Rock were almost ghost towns!). The local kiddies' water park was jumping (no pictures 'cos you can't take a picture of kiddies in a playground anymore!) and there were a lot of people in The Circle - a kind of roundabout place where 5 roads meet in the middle of the town. The main street, Queen Street, leads through the Circle with a nice overhead arch.

A mural in town celebrated the local saw mill industry taking timber from the forests through carpenters to furniture making. Across town at the museum a monument tells a similar story from loggers through to children playing to people reading news papers: The Passage of Time.

Of peculiar items we saw today:

Another Arctic Watershed marker - this time the water is flowing south to the Atlantic Ocean (no photo)
A car driving on the train line
Butterflies congregating at drying mud puddles, extracting important minerals from the wet soil
A singer sewing machine including its original table
A height finder radar antenna - we expect not quite functional anymore
Aaaahh Tim Horton's steeped tea and coffee
A dinosaur...

A nice place for our penultimate stop - tomorrow we are off to Val-d'Or in Quebec for the last couple of days.

May/June 2022

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