Price of gas: $5.03 a gallon
MEC stores visited: 1 (Winnipeg)
Brandon, Manitoba to International Falls, MN
Shockingly, I woke up this a.m. and it was raining. Truly shockingly, however, the rain did stop along the way and mostly stayed away. I even saw some blue sky. I swear, actually, the blue sky appeared as I was crossing the Canadian-U.S. border. But I get ahead of myself…
A little more than an hour from Brandon is Winnipeg, the capitol of Manitoba and home to about 75% of Manitoba’s population of 1 millionish. It also has an MEC store. MEC is Mountain Equipment Co-op, which is the Canadian version of REI. I’ve never been to one of their stores, so I thought this would be good. It was. It feels very familiar, even their logo is not dissimilar to REI’s. They used REI as a model to get started in the 1960s, but do have some differences. They only sell to members, while REI will sell to anyone but only gives a dividend to members; a membership, lifetime, is $5 (REI’s is $20). They give 1% to the planet; 5 cents to an environmental organization every time you don’t use a bag. I joined so I could buy some stuff from them… interestingly, they’re opening bike shops this year and will start carrying MEC bicycles in 2010. Hmm.
I talked to one of the staff members there about where I was heading (Kenora /Lake of the Woods) and he seemed to think it was a better idea if you had your own boat. Nope, bicycle was enough to carry. He referred to Saskatchewan and Manitoba as the “have not” provinces and even said Canada would be easier if you could just smash Alberta and Manitoba together. Too funny. Anyway, I enjoyed my stop-through…
From there it was pretty much open road to Kenora, but I ran into something I hadn’t seen much of in a while: TREES! From Alberta right up past Winnipeg, aside from a small area called Spruce Woods, it is all prairie and all open and flat as far as you can see. Whew.
Something else I hadn’t anticipated was how heavily Canada does shut down after Labour Day. The visitor center on the Manitoba side was closed because it was a Tuesday, and on the Ontario was closed for the season, period. Argh! No recommendations about where to go. I was tempted by Lake of the Woods. It’s enormous, and glorious – Canada’s second largest inland lake, after Hudson Bay. You can go a lot of places on that lake, I was driving past it for hours. Kenora is the “main” town on the lake, but there too, visitor center closed – too bad! – and by then I was frustrated. I also realized that my MEC friend was right – it’d be better to have my own boat. I decided to heck with it, I was heading for the U.S. via International Falls. I was back in the part of Canada that’s “trees and rocks and water” and it was lovely to drive through, but I just wanted to be done. I stopped in a place called Nestor Falls for dinner and was served by a chatty old bloke named Paul who has been there for 40 years and trying to sell his house & little restaurant for the last 5. Anyone, anyone? I saw someone riding an ATV as their form of transportation. And of all things – I think it was a county name – I passed through Finland. I also passed through a town called Emo. Yep, we’re in the country.
Anyway, no border wait on Tuesday afternoons, made it across. I grew up spending part of my summers in Minnesota and Wisconsin, where my grandparents lived. There’s a certain smell that’s something like hot tar and river water that I can’t explain, but it’s a deeply personal smell to me. The area around Voyageurs smells like that. It felt like childhood…
I decided to camp and picked a spot. The lady said it had been near 90 the last two days and only that day had the weather changed. Arggggh!
Voyageurs looks to be a bit of a bust, at least this end of it. The visitor center was already closed, but this is not the visitor center where you can rent boats from the NPS at any rate. And true to form, past labor day, there’s not much on offer – the boat tours they do at other times of the year, they don’t do right now. Sigh. On the other hand, northern Minnesota is lovely and flat and very bikeable! Excellent. The wind is up tonight, but hopefully by morning it will have blown itself so I can get a ride in. I’m a bit stir crazy after the last three days…
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