A Long and Winding Road

This morning as there are no coffee making implements in our motel room Barry walks two blocks to the nearest restaurant and brings back coffee - isn’t that what love is! It is a beautiful morning with minimal wind and if we’ve learned one thing on all our travels it is to savour the moment especially if it involves weather. So we sit on the curb in front of our room, sip coffee, and observe our fellow travellers greet the day. One young fellow looks at us and asks incredulously “You have coffee in your room?”. We point him in the right direction. The couple to our immediate left eyes us suspiciously as they load their car - and we try to imagine what they’re thinking: a couple of rode-worn bikers getting their morning fix.
A young man from Manitoba, originally from the West Indies, saunters over to talk. His job involves taking applications for car purchases from First Nation people and he is attending the annual Sagamowoc Assinabe Powwow that is taking place here in Massey this weekend. He and his partner travel in a company vehicle from powwow to powwow and receive $1000 for every application that results in a purchase. He wears much gold jewellery which we conjecture is either a ‘dress-for-success‘ strategy or a way of carrying all his worldly possessions on his person. He talks about the 18 hours of solid driving between here and Winnipeg but also how much he likes the opportunities to talk and to travel his job permits. We are reminded of all the many people we’ve met who have come to Canada and been overwhelmed by its beauty, its size, and the friendliness of its people.
The Serpent River First Nation and other First Nation tribes live on much of the land where we are riding and in the nearby Mississagi Provincial Park campers can participate in Gitchi Manito Ekinamadiwin (Great Spirit Teachings) learning about the local Ojibway culture. What a wonderful opportunity! The Serpent and the Mississagi rivers and many lakes will wind along Highway 17 with us today. We stop for breakfast about a half hour down the road where there is a gas station and a very busy Tim Horton’s sitting out in the middle of nowhere in the trees - only in Canada, eh?
Sadly the weather deteriorates as the morning progresses and we reconsider making another try to the Manitoulin Islands from Espanola and press on to Sudbury instead. Huge smokestacks and even higher telecommunication and power transmission towers are almost all we see of Sudbury as H17 bypasses this city of mining, smelting, refining, and geological science. It is a surprising flat landscape but geologists believe the mineral-rich Sudbury Basin was formed 2 billion years ago when a huge meteorite struck.
We ride through a beautiful landscape of ponds, rivers, beaver dams, and timber. There are many anglers and canoeists, some packing their canoes down the side of the highway to launch and many with their canoes tied to small rough campsites on rocky overhangs or small sandy beaches. The wind has picked up and the sky is overcast and we hope these campers have good raingear (like we do).
North Bay is our late lunch destination and although we hoped to eat near the lakeshore to take in the view, that is not to be as it’s spitting rain, cold, and very windy. We ride along Lakeshore Drive and watch large waves breaking on the grey, forbidding surface of Lake Nipissing. This is a beautiful lakeshore that the people of North Bay can be rightly proud of and we try to imagine it on a better day. We linger over an excellent lunch at Kristelle’s Deli and Bakery before facing the road again.
We are very tired today and if we weren’t expected by Marlene’s brother Clair in Pembroke, Ontario we would stop, as the sky is dark and the road seems long. To be fair, this is a very scenic highway and we follow the impressive Ottawa River all the way from Mattawa to Pembroke.