Wild Ontario Roadways

Another driving day today, got up early in Thunder Bay and hit the road for Sault Ste Marie. For anyone expecting awesome ghost town stories, my apologies but it was actually past Sault Ste Marie so I won't have any stories about it until tomorrow.

However, that does not mean that today was devoid of awesome memories. This trip has had a few objectives that I've been hoping to achieve since the start. I wanted to see how flat the prairies are, I wanted to walk in Banff National Park, I wanted to see lots of wildlife and I wanted to get ice cream from a highway roadside ice cream stand.

Now obviously I have done the majority of them, and while I have seen lots of wildlife there has been one animal that has been eluding me: The Moose. I don't know if I somehow travelled across the country in some sort of sub-par Moose season, but I assumed that going in the high season of spring, there would be Moose stumbling out of winter hibernation (Or whatever they do) and want to have delicious food and salts that could both be located near people. However I was spurned at every turn, driving the entire distance west (save Newfoundland) of the Trans-Canada Highway and then coming back almost 3/5th's east I had yet to see a single one. Even walking through multiple national parks and a few provincial ones, still no Moose. It's almost like they have some sort of Moose Information Network and they warned all Moose to stay 500m away from me. Either way it doesn't matter because today I saw not just one, not just two, but five Moose spread out across a 50km stretch of highway.

I'm like the paparazzi, I don't stop until I find wild animals in their most vulnerable

So that made me feel that much more accomplished in the perspective of this roadtrip. Geoff and I have had spirited debates on whether the side of the road ice cream stand on highways are more or less extinct. He hypothesizes that because people are lazy, they figure they drive right on past ice cream stands knowing that they have tubs of it at home, or can just get it where ever they are going. I feel that side of the road ice cream stands, especially by gas stations strike at you when you're most vulnerable. Picture it: you're driving down the highway, it's really hot and you're super bored, when suddenly an ice cream stand appears like a mirage in the desert. As you approach it, you realize it is real, and you pull over and get a cone.

The ice cream stand was turning out to be like the moose of the trip, but since we've gotten past Regina we've passed more and more of them, especially in Ontario. It appears that they just don't open until the Victoria Day weekend so they sort of spring up like toadstools across the way. Unfortunately I haven't stopped at any of them because of our 'no turning around-sy's' on our roadtrip. Basically if we pass something on the highway but we've already passed it, it's gone forever unless we travel back in the opposite direction later. While this may seem heartless, if we turned around for everything that seems interesting, we'd still be in Alberta going towards BC at this point. Suffice to say, I haven't gotten any ice cream yet.

We stopped at a rest stop after a while and I took the opportunity to take in the sights. While I'm going to show everyone a nice picture of the river with the overpass, you need to be warned that this place was not so idyllic. We discovered a veritable murder ground of small woodland creatures. Normally I wouldn't worry about this, it's nature and stuff gets eaten all the time, since animals need to eat too, and large animals sometimes eat smaller ones. However today I found a rabbit's foot, then I found another one, and then I found a disemboweled bird carcass. It was like there was some sort of woodland party going on at the rest stop and something just came in and ate the stuffing out of the whole lot of them, then left pieces of the lesser animals everywhere as some sort of warning. Maybe there was some sort of animal kingdom serial killer on the loose! I didn't think about it too hard because we really needed to get back on the road.

Looks like a job for CSI: Ontario Wilderness. "Looks like the killer couldn't bear to stay around... YEEAAAAAAHHH"

Finally we made one last stop in Wawa before getting to our destination. Now we didn't actually go into Wawa, we just visited the tourism centre because of the giant goose. The giant goose has a bit of a story, it's a 9m tall steel Canadian Goose that stands on the intersection of Highway 101 and Highway 17. The town of Wawa means "Wild Goose" in Ojibwa, so they wanted to make a statement that reflected their heritage. A local businessman wanted to build this statue to commemorate the construction of Highway 17 across the shores of lake superior that created an access point for Wawa. Up to the construction of Highway 17 (Which wasn't completed until 1960) the only way to get to Wawa was by ferry or train, so getting a highway was a bit of a big deal.

Most the town thought that a statue was a stupid idea, but he went and built it anyway from his own pocket. Unfortunately he made it basically out of plaster and chicken wire, and anyone who knows anything about Canadian weather can see this is a bad idea. After a total of two years the statue was basically falling apart, but it had done it's job, it was a draw to Wawa for motorists and it was a rallying point for the community, so they replaced the statue with a huge foundation and topped it with the steel bird designed by a famous European immigrant who has designed other monuments across the highway. So the giant goose stands to this day.

All that was missing was mounds of poop everywhere and it would be completely realistic

The statue was build with support from the Federal and Provincial Governments of the time. I figure this was sort of the 'stimulus spending' of the 1960's. Instead of funding the replace the doorknobs in Universities and public buildings, they just build giant animal statues across the Trans-Canada Highway. Probably about as useful.

Tomorrow we're planning on getting to Oakville for a free stay at Dad's house and some all you can eat sushi. Oh also the ghost town too! Hopefully we don't get possessed! As with when we went to the mint, if there is no post tomorrow or you get one that suddenly has a change in tone or content, call an exorcist.