Updates from the Van - Outside of Thunder Bay

Posted on October 14, 2009  •  3 minutes  • 460 words

So I’ve managed to warm my fingers up enough to type this out. I’m currently laying in bed in my van, parked in this awesome campground just outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario. We’ve got a great view of Lake Superior, a bunch of blankets, and even some power to plug our van into. Which means a fully charged laptop and ipod for tomorrow (woop x2). Driving for the most part is pretty awesome. The van is running relatively well, burning a bit of oil, but nothing completely unexpected.

So here’s some updates from the road… Manitoba was alright, not a huge change of scenery from Saskatchewan until we got past Winnipeg. I promised to say something good about Winnipeg. So here goes. Winnipeg, you remind me of Regina, but bigger. Also, you have a lot of speeding ticket camera’s at intersections, which Regina does not, so I suppose it might be safer there. Also, the sunset I saw over Winnipeg was very colourful, as was the sunrise. So there you go, four compliments in total. Back to some updates… we slept outside of Winnipeg at some sleazy rest stop, thankfully nobody bothered us nor our van, probably because it was so ridiculously cold out. To give you a rough idea of how cold it was, there was ice on the inside and outside of the van when we awoke. So we got up, and decided to make it as far as we could with this big ugly van. Once again we drove East, this time towards Ontario. Ontario is so far a super cool province, lots of trees, rocks, hills, lakes, etc. Always something to look at on a long drive. Which is refreshing after seeing miles after mile of prairies. After about 11 hours of driving we made it to Thunder Bay. We drove around town, but decided we’d find a campground before getting too cozy. After getting lost for a half hour, we finally managed to find the highway we’ll be heading out on tomorrow, along with a campsite. The cool thing I’ve been noticing about the campgrounds we’ve been seeing along the way is that a lot of them have wifi. So any backpacker with a laptop should be able to benefit from this. A couple cans of ravioli later, and we’re here in the van, writing this up. Trying to decide whether we want to do anything aside from sleep. So far, sleep has the upper hand. With it being so cold, and doing such long hours of driving, we really don’t feel like we’re up to much. Although we do have a bottle of whiskey in our fridge…along with some beers. Perhaps… But probably not, I think we’ll save that up for the weekend. [mappress]