Gr@y & Blue Fall Road Trip 14

Tonight I am at Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. The campsite is on the shores of Marie Louise Lake - although I arrived after the park office closed I was lucky enough to get a shore side campsite - did not realize about the premium price (note to self, read fine print). I will be here ofr two nights. This is supposed to be a birding hotspot at the pennisula that the park is on juts out southward, east of ThunderBay, into Lake Superior and acts like a funnel as birds migrate south and is a first landfall in northern migration.

From Quetico it is about a 2 hour drive by car or 2 days by bike to Thunder Bay. The route I drove bypassed the central part of the city and headed north towards Nipigon. On the Thunder Bay Expressway headed to Nipigon, they have a lookout and a memorial to Terry Fox who had to stop his run very close to that locale in 1981 before he lost his life to cancer. Terry was born the same year as I was and I found it quite emotional reading the plaques at this site. One thing that I find a little odd is that as we rode across Canada, this was the only major site we knew of that did not allow foot traffic or bicycle traffic access to it via the Expressway - there are no other roads to it. As such, we did not see it at that time.

I arrived at Sleeping Giant with plenty of time to spare for a change and headed to Silver Islet, a very quaint cottage country village at the end of the peninsula beyond the provincial park. What ever store this village had seemed to be closed and the rest mostly looked like vacation cottages. There did not seem to be any power or cell phone reception here and the pay phone at the camp site seemed to be for emergency service only. I drove back about 40 km to the highway to call Yolanda and touch base letting her know where I was and that I would be out of reach for the 2 days I had planned to be here. 

Prior to leaving Silver Islet I managed to see a Red Fox almost playing catching bugs, a black bear checking out someones backyard and a small flock of American Pipits (above).