Part Two

So after traveling along Lake Superior for a day and a half total, on $5 per gallon gas anytime we can to anything remotely resembling a town, we stopped in Thunder Bay, ON. Pretty big town as far as that area is concerned. About 115k people I think the sign said. It was still Eastern Time Zone there, so it didn't get "dark" till about 11pm. This is a picture of the cloudy night time sky at about that time from our hotel window.


On Thursday we traveled the remaining 350 miles northwest to Red Lake. We went through the last "real" town (meaning it had a Wal-Mart) about 2 1/2 hours before we got to Red Lake. Red Lake is a little gold and coal mining town with about 4000 residents. And a Kingdom Hall, believe it or not! And it's the last town before there are no more roads (except a logging road used for log trucks only, and only for a short distance north), no more houses, nothing. Except the outpost lake cabins, of course.

We spent Thursday night and Friday in Red Lake, relaxing at the hotel after the long drive. We shopped for our groceries for the cabin and packed them in our spare duffel bag. We listened to the natives, who really do say "eh" and awful lot! I thought I might start sounding like them after awhile. "Eh" really is quite a useful word. It seems to mean "huh", "what?", "you know?", "and stuff", and several other things. One lady, who owns the only pizza place in town, told us after I asked that "It doesn't get that cold here in the winter... Sometimes about 40 below, eh, but it's sunny, eh." I think she says it that way ("not that cold") just to get a reaction out of the foreigners. Which she got.

Saturday morning we had to get to the fly out place on Red Lake by 7am. They weighed our stuff. It was 144 lbs for both of us, and we had to be under 200. We could have brought more stuff! More on what we wish we had later.

The flight on the Otter was what Jason looked forward to most, I think. And it didn't disappoint. It wasn't the slightest bit scary, and it was gorgeous. Jay sat in the cockpit and I sat on a bench along the right side windows. I took a bunch of pictures, but mostly I like the ones that were like this. They are labeled in my folder as "TheEarth".
Nothing but water and trees. What we expected to see, but much more impressive than can be imagined.

When we got dropped off at our cabin, there was a middle-aged couple there that was just leaving. They warned us that they didn't catch many fish so they couldn't recommend any good spots. :( The wife gave us a tour of the cabin, shower house and outhouse. She wouldn't go closer than about 15 feet from the outhouse and explained that she found other means of... you know... She just couldn't use the outhouse. I, by the way, managed to use it by spraying the supplied fly killer everywhere before entering the outhouse, which made a nice smell and kept things from flying up at me from the hole. We are supposed to be roughing it at least a little, right?

I was really looking forward to the night time there to see what it was like, being completely alone, just us, deafeningly quiet, and what I thought would be somewhat terrifying. Actually it was wonderful. It was a little cool the first couple nights so we (Jason) built a fire in the wood stove to heat up the cabin for the night. We slept to the sound of crackles and an occasional loon bird howling in the distance.

It doesn't really get dark there this time of year. It was mostly dark at about 3am (think 9:30pm around here), and started getting light again at 4am. That helped things not be scary. We never awoke to a bear or anything trying to get us, so all went fine. The only occasional issue was an unmistakable bbbsssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz by our ear. The mosquitos were bad. One night we could actually hear them swarming outside. I was regularly seen walking around with a mosquito coil smoking between my fingers. Anyone who had seen me would have thought I picked up a nasty habit. We went through an entire can of bug spray in the 5 days we were there.

The fishing was bad for a good bit of the days. We had a couple good days where we caught 15-20 in 8 hours of fishing. All together we caught 60 fish. Jason bought a fancy fillet knife for the trip so we could eat some of the Walleye, and every time we caught one that was small enough to keep and eat (we had to throw back anything over 18", as if they'd ever know), I'd feel sorry for it and we'd throw it back. Once, while one lay huffing and flopping by my feet, I started crying. How would I feel if I was about to eat something and suddenly was terrified and couldn't breathe?

So we ate the very last Walleye we caught on day 5, and that was it. I talked myself into it. It was pretty good, but I'm not a big fish person anyway so I was happy only killing one fish. LOL

The biggest Pike we caught was about 26 inches I think, and Walleye about 24 inches. Nothing too huge. One day we only caught 2 fish. We started catching more when we went over to a portage lake, which means we parked the boat along the bank and walked to another little lake where they had a canoe set up. So we did get some exercise that week - rowing the canoe.

Storms roll in suddenly out there. We'd be basking in the sun and suddenly hear thunder. We had to race back to the cabin and were guaranteed to still be soaking wet by the time we got there. In the next post I will have some of my favorite pictures. One is of a storm that had just passed over a little while before. Several were cloud formations and extremely calm water following a storm.

We got picked up and dropped off in Red Lake without any issues at all. The only injuries were gigantic mosquito bites. I had one on my ankle where the welt was about 6 inches across and the whole thing itched. I had one behind my ear and one on my jaw bone that are STILL THERE and still itch occasionally.

We drove back to Thunder Bay and then decided to head home through US to save on gas. We saved $200 that way! We traveled through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and then to PA. Even though we only traveled 6 hours the first day back to Thunder Bay, we drove the remaining 24 hours straight through. We wanted to just get home. Jay actually drank coffee (GASP!) so he could drive when it was dark. I can't do that. I had coffee too and still abruptly got sleepy when it got dark. We got home Saturday morning around 9am.

The time zones changed on us in weird ways- it is Eastern time in Thunder Bay, Central time in the US south of there. So when we went home, we went from Eastern to Central and back to Eastern. My cell phone didn't know WHAT was going on. At one point it was three hours off.

Anyway, that's about all for the stories. If I can think of anything else I'll put up a new post.

Oh yeah - the tally for the wildlife that we saw is 4 moose (two on the road during the trip, two crossing Shearstone lake), two bald eagles (one in a tree near Red Lake, one flying overhead at Shearstone), a black bear on the road, a snapping turtle on the road, and a caribou. The caribou was in the water and as we motored over toward it we scared it half to death as it tried to get out of the water and back onto the land. Also we saw a CUTE red squirrel that moved into the eaves of the cabin the morning we left.

On to part three!