Movin' on up the road

  

Monday started out rainy and stayed that way until brightening off and on in the afternoon. We were headed to what's become a common stopping point for us, the Walmart in Sault Ste Marie. We planned to do some sightseeing around SSM this time, as we'd get there pretty early in the day.

Unfortunately the Bush Plane museum we hoped to tour is closed Mondays. It likely would have been a good place to spend part of a rainy afternoon. 

We also wanted to see something of the canal and locks that connect Lakes Superior and Huron. They are mostly in the US now, which we knew. We didn't expect the only view we got of the canal on the Canadian side:

Notice the dimensions of the section of restored original lock.

The area around the model had several restored buildings, but all apparently for various businesses to use. The main current canal is inaccessible to the public mostly, as far as we could tell. 

 

Ah well, some days are like this. After a nap in the van at Walmart, we walked to a nearby Swiss Chalet for a yummy supper as a consolation.

Tuesday's leg:

 

A much better day today, for the drive from Sault Ste Marie up to Wawa, and on west along the north Lake Superior shore. We stopped along the shore for a few pics:

 

Wild Columbine

 

A short video of the wave action:

 

At Old Woman Beach we got a surprise. The beach nearest the bay is now separated from the shore, a lot of it is like a sandy reef now:

Still very pretty though:

In Wawa we also got a couple of surprises. One was EV chargers:

Petro-Canada is starting their own EV charge network

A competitor gas station has a number of genuine Tesla chargers

It makes me think that we'll be able to drive EVs across Canada fairly easily before too long.

There were also some murals in town, much like Roslyn Washington, which was used in the old Northern Exposure TV series:

We have followed a couple on Youtube for a while, their channel name is "Art We There Yet". One of the things they were hired to do on their way to Alaska was to paint large murals as town projects. This one is on the arena building in Marathon:

If you'd like to see the process they went through, see "Painting an EPIC Community Mural in Marathon, Ontario!" on YouTube, link here: <Marathon Mural>.

 

Park note: The Provincial park we're in used to be called Rossport. Now it's become part of another nearby park called Rainbow Falls. The only distinction I can find is that site numbers in the former Rossport all start with the letter R, whereas the sites in the Rainbow Falls park all start with the letter W. 

Neither park is manned today. Apparently "Rossport" is staffed Thursday thru Sunday. I didn't see the schedule at the "other" Rainbow Falls park, but there was no staff there today either.  

The only way we could legally get a site for the night here was to get online and do a 1-day reservation. That was hard enough to do (and expensive, with the reservation fee adding about 25% to a 1-day site cost), but I successfully fought through the reservation system. 

A German-speaking couple in a rental motorhome were not so lucky. I tried to help them and we got partway through, but eventually they threw up their hands in disgust and left.

Those with long memories may remember that Ontario tried reservation-only quite a number of years ago, and it failed miserably. Hopefully the current system will also be replaced soon, with a dose of common sense added.

There's a nice view from our site though: