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Published: July 18th 2018
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First to finish up with yesterday: we took a walk by the Lake of the Woods after supper yesterday evening. You can see by the pictures that it was a very peaceful walk. As a matter of interest, I find the glaciated sculpting of the rocks that are the Canadian Shield to be fascinating. You can see by the pictures that tremendous pressure was put on these rocks by the glaciers that rode over them during glacial periods. They scraped everything down to the bedrock as they drove through, scratching the rocks as they went. This has always fascinated me. The striations are very clear.
This morning when we got up the outside temp (wait for it Brently!) was 53 degrees with a crisp 60 degrees inside...until John got up and turned the heat on! We left camp at 9:25 heading back into the little town of Kenora where we parked and took a quick walk around town. It is a cute little town but not a prosperous as towns like this which we have seen in big summer vacation areas such as Lake of the Woods is. We did enjoy our walk and I took a few pictures.
About 12 miles out of town we stopped at Rushing Waters Provincial Park thinking we might spend the night there. It wasn’t as pretty a park as we were in last night and it was still early (11:00) and really too soon for us to want to stop for the day so we officially headed for the US/Canadian Border at 11:30.
Our drive was through more of the Canadian Shield/Lake views scenery. It was quite a nice drive, but it sure looks like it would be miserably cold in the winter. Mike, it reminds us of Maine as well as Alaska—that northern look that makes you know you would have to be strong to survive there.
We reached the border at 3:00 and just had a slight glitch. As the saying goes, “our number came up” and we were very nicely asked to pull over to the side to be inspected. Everyone was very polite and we only lost about 20 minutes there. While there, we asked how far it was to Voyageurs National Park and on being assured that it really wasn’t far, we decided to make a quick stop in order to check it off of
our “never visited” National Park list. Thanks Carol H. for the suggestion!
We got to Voyageurs at 3:30 where we took a quick look around the area, and watched the movie at the Rainy Lake Visitors Center. The park preserves a portion (54 miles) of the route of the voyageurs...also the Ojibwa Indians, miners loggers, and early settlers. The park encompasses 218,000 acres. It lies in the 14,900 square-mile Rainy lake Basin. About 70% lies within Ontario, Canada and 30% in Minnesota. Since Voyageurs is a water based park, travel to the 500 plus islands and 655 miles of shoreline is by watercraft. Obviously we didn’t have the time or the ability to do more that a “Chevy Chase at the Grand Canyon” look around before we had to be back on our way, leaving there at 4:00 and continuing driving south.
We arrived at our campground, Hamilton’s Fox Lake Campground at 6:30. It is a very nice Mom and Pop lying right on (I assume) Fox Lake, of which we have a partial view out of our front window. This is such a casual place, there was a notice on the door just to pick a place
and pay in the morning! Don’t see that too often. We were glad to be stopped as this has been a fairly long, albeit good, day. We drove 261 miles.
Tomorrow we plan to drive to the (alleged) place where the Mississippi River begins. Maybe it is like the “center of ??” places that we have seen already on this trip? Stay tuned!
PS—the light up north is so crisp and clear...makes for beautiful views.
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Tom
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Moose
I moose have it!