Top Ten Things to do in Northwestern Ontario

In no particular order:

1) Visit Kakabeka Falls. 

I was up north this past week. I flew to Thunder Bay on Monday and spent the night there. At eight a.m. the following morning, a member of my team and I joined up with some colleagues from the Northern Region Office. We were to drive like maniacs first to Dryden, Ontario (about four hours) and then turn sharply north and drive for another hour and a half to the remote and tiny (less than 100 people) settlement of the Wabaskang First Nations community. 

But that doesn't mean we didn't sightsee along the way. 

Enjoy the brief video of the falls on a foggy morning with snatches of conversation in the background about how far people had to portage to get around the falls. It is the very first video I have included in this blog. 

Blocking the view of the falls: me, Amy Leung, Michael Gluck, Joseph Tyance

2) Eat at Bight by the Waterfront in Thunder Bay

My travelling companion/team member, Amy, had never been to Thunder Bay before. So we had to go see the Sleeping Giant. Because we'd gone all that way (about twenty minutes by cab from our hotel by the airport), we had dinner at Bight, where the food can't match the view, but the food is still pretty good.

Bight's pakoras: called an appetizer, really a meal. I couldn't eat them all at dinner, so I took the leftovers back to my hotel room and had them for breakfast the next day.

Blocking the view of the Sleeping Giant: me and Amy.

3) Visit the Suspension Bridge Overhanging a Famously Polluted River in Dryden

After our meeting with the Wabaskang community, we had dinner and spent the night in Dryden before heading back to Thunder Bay to catch our flight to Toronto. This gave us a chance to see the mill site at the centre of the controversy. Long ago an egregious polluter, the plant now is a model of environmental compliance. But some of the the legacy contamination is still there, the beautiful scenery notwithstanding.

4) Get Excited About Entering/leaving a Time Zone

Our travels took us to just the other side of the divide between the Eastern and Central Time Zones. This in itself is not remarkable; we live in a big country. What was remarkable was how much confusion the time change caused. 

For example, we understood we were to meet with the First Nations community at 1:00 p.m. their time, just after lunch. They, however, had thought they had invited us for 1:00 our time, noon their time, so that they had lunch prepared for us to share with them: home made moose sausage and wild rice soup. 

Due to construction delays on the highway and some missteps in figuring out where, exactly, on their reserve we were supposed to meet them, we were about half an hour late by our reckoning and an hour and a half late by theirs. 

So lunch was long over by the time we got there and we had been inadvertently rude to our hosts. I deeply regretted not having the opportunity to try the soup.

Me, Joseph and Amy. We also have a picture of the other side of the sign announcing the entry into the eastern time zone.

5) Get Even More Excited About the Arctic Watershed

I also regret my expression in this photo, but it's the only shot I've got of the watershed sign.

6) Get Your Photo Taken with a Cancer-Survivor Marathon Runner Crossing Canada on Crutches

The gentleman in the middle is Guy Amalfitano. He is from France. He was sick with cancer when he was seventeen and watched from afar Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope. It gave him hope, so now he is running across Canada in tribute to Terry Fox and to raise awareness and money for cancer research. We passed him on our way to Dryden and knew he'd be on the highway on our way back. In a rare stroke of luck, he was actually stopped on the side of the Trans-Canada, so we clamoured out of our vehicle to get this photo. You can find his web site here.

7) Drive Along a Famously Polluted River

As an urban denizen sadly accustomed to concrete encased environs, I was delighted to spend hours watching the beautiful countryside go by. 

Michael's plain language explanation for the variations in the terrain as we travelled was: first, "rocks and trees," (glaciated moraines) then "different trees on sand without rocks" (ancient sand dunes) and then "different trees on clay" (ancient lake bed).

It was all spectacular. The shot above shows rapids along the Wabigoon river, far downstream from where we stood on the suspension bridge by the mill. These rapids are what are almost always photographed when a newspaper, such as the Toronto Star, runs a story about Grassy Narrows.

8) Visit the Centennial Mosaic in Dryden

Included in the park where you can find the suspension bridge is a charming tribute to Dryden's centennial, though I think they might have come up with a better name than "Pieces of Dryden." 

9) Watch Them Tip Trucks at the Dryden Pulp Mill

Even if you have never wondered how they quickly unload tractor trailers full of wood chips, now you know: they back them onto a platform, turn on the hydraulic lifts and tip them 'til they're empty.

10) Limp (not pictured)

On the Friday before I left on my trip to the northwestern reaches of the province, I felt myself coming down with a cold. Resolved to knock it back, I went to the gym every day on the weekend, worked up a sweat on the weight machines, took dry and steam saunas, took a lot of Cold FX and successfully fought the cold. 

I also injured myself on the weight machines, straining the muscles in my lower right leg. The thing about my reconstructed right leg is I don't know what its limits are until I pass them. So I hobbled around like Festus everywhere we went.

Since my return from the north, I have been careful to rest the injured muscle and let it heal. We're travelling to Italy one week from today, and I don't want limping to be on my top ten list there.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen