Two Lanes, Top Down, Green Dots: Day 11: Rossport, ON to Rouyn-Noranda , QC

Day 11

Miles 532 (3735)
Two Lanes 532 (3238)
Top down 532 (3311)

Again we awoke to fog. As we drove along the north shore of Superior it would break up on places and beautiful vistas of the lake and its multiple north shore islands would appear.

We stopped for lunch in the ‘city’ of Wawa, population 3000. This is major road junction for those heading southeast to Sault St. Marie and then on to Michigan or Toronto. Or for those like js to choose to travel into the more remote spaces across the northeast to reach upper Ontario or Quebec. We stopped at a very nice city park along a lake and had lunch. A man approached and asked what part of California we were from. His wife was from SoCal and his sister in law lives in Santa Cruz. He was waiting for the fog to lift so he could go up in a chopper and do the annual count of peregrine falcon nests. Several years ago when they were endangered, they found one nest along the north shore. Last year they found twelve. They are now upgraded to ‘threatened’.

So off we drove, 180 miles across the Canadian shield. This landscape, which covers most of Canada, is the result of the power of the ice ages. As these massive sheets of ice descended from the polar areas, they scraped up everything in their way, including mountains. So what is left are thousands of square miles of fairly flat land, with small rolling hills, and small lakes. The overall elevation changes vary in +/- 250 feet. The area is covered with dense forests small diameter firs and aspens. It is heavily logged in places.

At th end of this road is Timmins, ON. For you country crossover pop fans, you know about this place. This is where Shania Twain grew up. Her story is tragedy and success. Born in Windsor, Ontario in 1965, her parents divorced in 1967. Her mother moved Shania and her sister to Timmons. She then remarried a local Ojibwe native. The stories about Shania abound, but the popular belief is that her parents were alcoholics. They often were short of cash, but they recognized the cash cow they had in Shania’s voice. They would send her to bed at the age of 11 or 12, then wake her up at 11 pm and drag h to the bars for her to sig and make the family money. When she was bojt 18 her parents were killed in a DUI motor vehicle accident. Shania raised her siblings and worked in nightclubs in the area to raise the needed money.

Then as Hollywood would have it, she as discovered by a music producer from Nashville. They got married and had children. She had a huge hit album in he early 90’s, and then her second album in 1997 was a worldwide sensation. It was the largest selling album by any woman ever, and the largest seller by any country western singer, man or woman, ever. Alas, it does end quite as a fairy tale, and Shania and her husband were divorced recently.

50 miles east of Timmons we enter France, or so it feels like. Everything is only in French. Even the villages look French. We are in Quebec. We arrive at our hotel in the industrial town of Rouyn-Noranda, check in, and walk past sidewalk cafes en route to dinner. The waitress, Monan, was very helpful and seemed to enjoy us speaking Franc-lish while she spoke Engl-ench. It was fun.

Tri-Colored Wild Lupine