Road Trip Day 2: Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie

 Waking up this morning and looking out the window my outlook on the day was as bleak as the weather outside.  I didn’t sleep very well and the pouring rain felt like it was adding insult to injury.

Sarah took the first driving shift.  It was not very pleasant. The scenery was grey and dingy, and the rain did nothing to help it.  We ended up stopping in for a coffee/pee break in a small town called Spanish.   We found the name somewhat amusing.  Sarah kept joking, “You know I’ve heard of French Ontario and English Ontario but you’d have known there was a Spanish Ontario too!”  She was also particularly amused by the accents she overheard.  She heard one lady say, “Oh gosh, oh geeze, I sure do love cheese whiz!”

In Spanish Barb switched to the drivers seat.  She was not pleased with my music selection at that point in time so I started working on creating a new playlist for her on my laptop.  It’s pretty cool how technology has evolved to the point where you can be creating playlist or even burning CDs in the car while on a road trip.  I was preoccupied with my music that I didn’t notice at first that Barb didn’t look so well.  It turns out her back went into spasm while she was driving.  How much would that suck?  I felt so bad for her.  She pulled us over on the side of the highway to so Sarah cool take over.  Thank goodness today was our shortest driving day - 4 hours.  Otherwise I don’t think Sarah would’ve been too pleased about having to do all the driving.

We reached Sault Ste. Marie, aka the Soo, by about 1:30pm.  Not before off-roading a little bit.  

Well not really but according to the GPS we were.

We decided to eat lunch at the Sault Ste. Marie Canal National Historic Site of Canada.  My friend, Ellysa, who I met while we were both on a Rotary exchange in Rouen, France, worked there for three years and recommended we check it out.  We walked around Whitefish Island, which had some nice trails and a view of Michigan.  Barb’s back pain had reduced by that point but she was still hurting.  She watched Sarah and I do some crazy stunts and didn’t complain.  Check out some pics below...

After our adventure at the canal we went in search of an Apple store.  Shortly after I made Barb’s playlist – a country mix – my computer stopped functioning.  It was super hot and I could tell that it was still running but the screen was black and it wouldn’t respond when I held down the power button.

We stopped at a nearby mall to see what we could come across.  Before finding out we had to head across town to the Future Shop we grabbed a bottle of wine for our host for the night, Ellysa’s mom Maria.  While we were there we saw a bottle of wine I thought my older brother, Will, might like.

Thought it was good wine for Will.  After all hippos are his power animal!

Once we got to Future Shop one of the tech guys fiddled around with my macbook for like a minute before he got it working.  Turns out it had overheated and spassed out.  At that point I realized that I had accidentally leaned it against the dash that is connected to the engine.  Whoops!  I won’t be doing that again.  It is all better now.  Yeah!

We had a little time to kill before Maria was off work so we ended up grabbing some Tim Horton’s and chilling in the van, in the parking lot.  Yeah we are just that cool.  While we were sitting there the wind picked up even more (it was windy all day) and it actually snowed a bit.  What bizarre weather day... Pouring rain, sun, and then snow!

Pic with the Elvis impersonator/Part-time waiter!

Dinner was absolutely delicious and Maria very generously treated us. On top of that she had cheesecake for us at her house for dessert.  Meg stuck around and chatted with us for a while and introduced us to her fiancé’s band, frank deresti and the lake effect.  His music was excellent so I decided to purchase his CD to listen to on tomorrow’s drive.

When Meg left I went through my old photos and found the ones of Ellysa and I in France, as well as, from Thanksgiving 2009 when I visited her in St. Catharine’s.  I think Maria enjoyed seeing the pictures and hearing some of my stories.  It was kind of funny... when I said hi to Meg earlier in the evening I said "Hey good to see you again" but I couldn’t remember if I had met her in France as well as in St. Catharine’s or just France.  She couldn’t remember either.  Well while I was going through the Thanksgiving photos I found some of us together.. Apparently we both have terrible memories.

SoI think I should leave it at that for tonight.  It has once again gotten really late.  I’m finding these posts are taking me much longer to write than I would like.  Maybe that will improve as the trip progresses…

Oh one last thing I want to mention.  Thanks Ellysa for helping organizing with your mom to host us!  We are very, very grateful for her hospitality!