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Published: July 16th 2007
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July 15, 2007. We just arrived in Thunder Bay. We left Winnipeg this morning. We’re at the Best Western Hotel again, after spending 1 ¼ nights at the Hilton in Winnipeg. They were the only ones with room for us at 4:30 am, when we arrived there! It was great there. Joey especially had always wanted to stay at a Hilton, “because they are world-renowned”, he said. The boy is a bohemian; let’s see if he can keep up with his own lifestyle aspirations when he’s an adult. So I go to wake him up in the morning, I lovingly gaze at his beautiful, innocent, peaceful face, his eyes still closed, and he mumbles sleepily: “Mom, I’m still tired. I need caffeine and sugar.”
The drive out to Thunderbay was nice, lots of little and big lakes. We heard Dave’s voice doing the station ID in the Kenora region, and a while later in Nowhere land, for a station called CKDR, if I remember correctly. It was cool, a piece of home. It’s a small world after all. Every few hundred klicks you can see pieces of shredded tire at the side of the road. Probably from old, overloaded trucks.
At one point we were held up for an hour due to an accident on the highway. A camper trailer van that had passed us earlier, had been in a collision. We came upon it after the worst was dealt with already, apparently, and the people involved had been taken away. Not sure if dead or alive. 3 trucks passed us by from the clean-up crew, the first one had a tarp on it and we couldn’t see what it contained, the next one had a sofa and other stuff from inside the trailer, and the third had the totally chewed up trailer in it, one half of it was missing. Must have been a bad one. At least no blood on the road. Joey and I played ball by the roadside while we waited.
On a happier note, we made a lunch stop in beautiful Kenora, where we invaded Tim Hortins and had our usual, chili combo. I give my donuts to Greg. I'll have to put these guys on a serious diet once the holidays are over. Funny, there are police cars cruising the area around all the Tim Hortins, but so far we haven’t caught any police
man in flagranti actually inside a TH. They must be waiting til there’s no customer around, then they sneek in and eat their donuts. ‘cause, what’s a police man without his donut? We need our traditional clichés upheld, it’s the foundation of our culture. Maybe we’ll have more luck that way in Chicago. Maybe it’s more of an American thing. Our navigator, aka Joey, treated his parents for lunch today, from the money uncle Chris gave him for the trip. There’s still quite a bit left over, and he will spend it some other way along the line. Greg voted for another lunch treat by Joey, but Joey feels there’s other spending options…He is a great kid to travel with, to my utter surprise. He does need some firm redirecting by his dad at times, but it’s no big deal. Like when I was in the front passenger seat, and Joey was relegated to the back seat behind me. He figures, he’s the navigator, thus it’s his inherent right to always sit in the front. So when I took a turn in the front seat, at the beginning he was indignant. He was quiet, but then started to throw little
rubber bouncy balls against the back of my head. He had a great time with that for a while. I enjoyed him having some fun, so I let it go on for a bit, but then put a stop to it. Since then he’s had no problem taking turns with me for the front passenger seat.
On our route today there were lots of signs “Moose on the Loose!” Apparently they come out at night and try to chase cars off the road. We tried to figure out the plural of moose. So then at every sign, Greg points at it as we drive by it and gleefully says “Meese!” As in one goose, two geese, one moose, two meese. I’m not sure about that. He tells me that a bunch of crows is called a “murder of crows”. I’ll have to look that up. If it’s correct, maybe the term was coined after Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds” came out. Another diversion is trying to make up tongue twisters. As in “try to say ‘bug blood’ 10 times fast”. Joey came up with that one when he figured out that, no, those are not raindrops on the windshield.
Greg
and Joey had been looking forward to roadside icecream stands, but we only found a number of tiny stores selling worms and leeches. Everywhere we went in around Kenora, they sold worms and leeches, even at the gas station. There was a boy at the cash register, all by himself in the store, he looked like he could have been Joey’s twin. He was 13, and told us he had that job already for 3 years. He was doing the pumping stations and store aspect of things, while his 14 year old brother handled the worms, leeches, fishing rods, archery stuff and what-not. Pretty impressive.
Right now, it’s 11:30 pm local time, and all you hear in this hotel room is the clicking of 3 laptop computers! Well, it will be lights out for tonight. Tomorrow morning we’ll go hunting; for a nice breakfast place that is. They don’t have breaky here at the BW for some reason. Then we’ll be off to Duluth, heading for Chicago. Good times.
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