Fresh...

I spent last week travelling over to the mainland to visit my nieces.

My middle niece Rachel and I then took an alternate route home.

There's nothing like having the leisure time to take the long road home.

And so we did...

From Tsawwassen on the mainland you can take the 1.5 hour ferry to points

south near Victoria or you can take a 2 hour ferry to the middle of the island

to Nanaimo. 

I've only done this route once at night so it was such a treat to be sailing

on a gorgeous clear morning...

...there was a beautiful dusting of fresh snow that lay like icing sugar across the landscape...

I've never been up into these mountains but I've looked at them from down below

for half of my life when I lived in Vancouver and the many many times I've taken these ferry rides...

...and still they catch my breath...

The two 'bumps' standing out here are called The Lions...

Sometimes from certain angles they really do look like two majestic Egyptian 

sculptures of regal beasts keeping watch...

As the sailing continued I said to my niece "people pay money to go on cruises

like this...how lucky we are to have this as part of our highway system!"

Closer to Nanaimo we passed the Entrance Island lighthouse station.

Built in 1885, one of the rare, still manned lighthouses on the coast,  it was built to

guide ships into the Nanaimo harbour from the Straight of Georgia, now renamed 

The Salish Sea by the Chemainus First Nations People who have lived here for thousands of years.

After an hour and a half drive we arrived on Denman Island to visit old friends and the mountains

up that way, the spine of Vancouver Island, looked just as lovely as ever...

There's a magic feeling of snow in December, right before the Solstice...

Winter skies travel gladly with us on our road trip...

Time to revisit the summer road trip...

The Coast has been hit with a major rain storm and the skies have

opened up and released a deluge of the wet stuff.

It's been coming down all night and still continues this morning so 

I thought I would share some more of our summer road trip across

Canada as an interruption to the damp and the grey.

Now let's see....where we're we....

Oh yes, on the wide open Prairies!

The Prairies are beautiful in the late summer, big wheat fields, gold against the big skies...

...and those sunsets! Wow! you can literally sit for an hour and watch it go down all around you...

 But oft times I thought of the hardships of this landscape, especially in the winter.
This particular little cemetery in the middle of nowhere brought that home
more than most places.

 Many of the dates were from the 1920's and '30's.
Many of them children under 3 years old.
Some were entire families.
There are many abandoned houses in the middle of fields where
maybe it just got to be too much for some people.
We were driving through Saskatchewan early one morning when we saw it...

 Up this dirt road ...there it was...

Remember the rhyme about the crooked man who had a crooked cane
and lived in a crooked house?
This was the place...

Other than using the dramatic filter on some, I did absolutely
nothing to distort these photos...

It seemed as if you stood beside the house and leaned on it, it would have toppled to the ground...

 The wheat fields going about their business growing up around the place...

 

 We dared not go inside...just gingerly looked through the glassless windows...

Who knows the story of this and many house like it out here...

If those walls could talk...

 

 

Courage not forgotten...

Before we left Ontario we had a few more stops we had to make.

One was in Thunder Bay.

The Terry Fox Memorial.

For those who may not know who he is,

 Terry Fox was a young man who had cancer.

Although he had already lost his leg at 18 to this disease, while in remission he

decided to bring hope, awareness and fundraising to the cause by

attempting to run across Canada, 5,300 miles.

He began by dipping his foot in the Atlantic Ocean and ran everyday, 26 miles a day.

Sadly when he reached Thunder Bay, 3,300 miles later, the cancer had returned

and spread to his lungs and he had to

stop his 'Marathon of Hope'.

He died a year later at 23 years old.

It's a beautiful park overlooking the waters of Lake Superior and

even though it is above the Trans Canada highway

there's something very peaceful about the place.

To this day, all across the country, and indeed the world,

there are Terry Fox runs, memorials, schools named after him,

and most importantly the fundraising continues in his name.

It was a very emotional place to be and to know what

this young man had been through and that he had to give up his dream

in this very spot.

It gives you faith in humans doesn't it?

 



The size of it all....

It's a known fact that if you've ever driven through Ontario, be prepared...

It's a big wide province which takes at least 3 days to get out of.

Funny thing is that you can pretty much drive through the next 2 provinces

in the  same amount of time or less.

Our trip through the great land of The Canadian Shield was full

of lots of rocks and trees and trees and rocks and many warning signs like this...

Giant albino moose at night?

Nothing says Canada like a big ass flag on a rock!

The Mighty Lake Superior that seems like an ocean at times..."The big lake they call Gitchagoomay" as Gordon Lightfoot sang in his homage to one of the giant freighters which went down, killing
all the men on board. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Not quite sure about this warning...no open cans of beans? soup? dog food?

And LOTS of water and trees...

Did I mention the rock?

Anyway, somewhere up around Thunder Bay we found a place that one
of the ladies at a visitor centre said was a must see.
"It's Canada's Grand Canyon you know" she said.
She gave us some vague directions and so after being a little lost, we finally
found the road up to Ouimet Canyon.
And we were the only ones there...
First the short hike in...

 Starting to feel like fall...

 Lovely birch trees everywhere...

...and there it was...

...shear red rock walls 300 feet high...

...looking the other way at the Indian Head pinnacle...

 

A little portrait for a souvenier!...

Think of the eons of time, rock and water to have carved this canyon...

 

Like I said, we had the place to ourselves except for the resident creatures who came to visit...

So the geography of rocks and trees presented to us in the most dramatic of forms.

Ouimet Canyon.

One of Ontario's silent beauties.