Rainbow Falls to Dryden ON

It was a beautiful day to drive across part of the northern Lake Superior shore. In spite of the reservation hassles, we had a good night's sleep at the Rainbow Falls / Rossport park. A few pictures from along the way:

A huge rock face beside a lookout area

A big truck for scale

A fairly new cable-stay bridge at Nipigon

A cute sign in Nipigon

We had passed through some major construction early in the day today but didn't take any pictures, then encountered similar work nearer Thunder Bay. It's hard to catch the scale of this with drive-by pics, but major improvements and rerouting of roads:

We did see evidence of earlier forest fires, with regrowth starting right away. Luckily we've had no forest fires to deal with on our route so far, not even smoky smells. 

Sorry for the reflections here

We carried on through Thunder Bay after a fuel stop and a few things at the Walmart. We stayed right on Hwy 11/17 instead of taking the hwy 102 trucker bypass. The 11/17 route is much nicer now, better than it was 40 years ago and a more interesting drive than the bypass.

On our way past Kakabeka Falls about 10:30 we saw a restaurant with a sign that they were now serving breakfast, so decided it was time for breakfast. Unfortunately they had just stopped serving breakfast. 😞

So we had their lunch special, a hot roast beef sandwich, excellent.

We debated driving further today since we reached Dryden about 3:20 CST (4:20 EST), but decided it was enough for today so are parked at Walmart for the night.

One of the things that has surprised us is the number of EV chargers in little towns along the Trans Canada Hwy. Often they are at a gas station, like Wawa's were. Here in Dryden they are at a Co-op gas bar, right next to the Walmart. Handy.

 

I talked to the young couple charging their Tesla. They are on their way home to BC, after coming from there to Quebec. They've had no problem finding chargers, but did admit you have to stay on the main routes. If you start going north from the TCH chargers are rare, especially fast chargers like these in Dryden.

An interesting tidbit (to me anyway, my apologies for the EV tech) is that they usually fully charge at stops. If they charged the battery from zero to a full 70 KWH, it would cost about $40. That gives them about 475 km of range. We'd use almost half a tank of diesel in our van for the same range, costing about $70 now. Their experience is that even using the expensive chargers along the way, it's still only costing them about half what it would cost to drive their previous gas car.