Day 64 – Quetico to Mine Center – A day full of excitement

We braved the mosquitos and had oatmeal for breakfast. We were very tempted to go canoeing in Quetico but decided it would be best to truck on and wait for the kayaking for out west. We headed out on the highway in the cool but sunny weather. Finally there was very little wind!

The road was starting to flatten out as we went along, which was another delight. Sunny, warmer temperatures, no headwind, and flatter roads. Things were starting to finally look up after a couple miserable days in the wind.

We stopped at the Atikokan visitor centre for lunch. For some reason it was closed but we found a picnic table in the shade. Chocolate milk, yogurt, salmon and crackers. The sign in the tourist office said Atikokan is the ‘Canoeing Capital of Canada’. It would be really amazing to go canoeing in Quetico someday. The wildlife along that you would see would be outstanding, not to mention the hundreds of kilometers that you could paddle in the wilderness.

I had been feeling a little discouraged the past few days on our trip, partly due to the ridiculous headwind, cold weather, and the long mundane days of cycling since Thunder Bay. Lake Superior was beautiful but once we left the lake the scenery had pretty much stayed the same. Rocks and trees and transport trucks. Those were our everyday encounters. I also felt like we hadn’t been making as much progress and we had also not met any other cyclists (they are very motivating) for a number of days.

As we were finishing out lunch, we had a family from Wisconsin come chat to us about our trip. They were impressed and very encouraging to us, saying that we will have so many great stories. A short little while, a couple from Alberta came to chat to us. She had overheard our previous conversation and found out we were from PEI. She and her husband were doing an across canada trip and were driving to PEI then eventually to Newfoundland. She was very nice and also very encouraging to us as well. She said the shoulders in Alberta are better than Saskachewan’s or Manitoba’s, which we found amusing because Amy and Chris (who we met in Sault Ste Marie) had said everyone they had met in each province always dissed the drivers and roads of the province to the east of them. Until you get to the East Coast, they got no one to diss! 🙂

Feeling a little more encouraged and in better spirits, we continued on. The pavement was in great shape and there was again very little traffic on Hwy 11. We had learned back in Agawa Bay during the talk by the arthor of the book on “Roads in Canada”, that Hwy 11 was a depression era ‘economic action plan’ project. He had said that it was a beautiful road that went from no where to no where with no one ever on it. No complaints from us cyclists! 🙂

I was feeling tired and thought of taking a sideroad to lie down and recurperate, but decided to keep going to see if I would feel a little better. It was a good thing because in a matter of seconds we saw a fellow touring cyclist coming up the hill our way!

We immediately pulled over to the other side of the road and met Don, a cyclist going from Vancouver to St John’s. Don had actually gone all the way up to the Northern most point accessible by road in Canada. Quite a feat on his bicycle on an unpaved road! He said it took him about 6 days to get there off the main highway, and another 7 days to get back. He said he got lucky with the weather since he had met another cyclist who was rain bound in a shipping container for 3 days (when it rain the dirt road can become uncyclable with a touring bike). I asked him about food and supplies and apparently you can have it shipped ahead to the tourist offices! Neat, but I guess the only way to do it!

What amazed us about Don (not just that he easily does 200km or more a day) was that he hadn’t met hardly any fellow touring cyclists since Prince Rupert, B.C. We had a great chat and shared some fellow touring cyclists info.

After saying good bye to Don we cycled for a few more minutes until we came across a walker. It looked like a hitch hiker but he was walking up the wrong side of the road. Very excited to see who he was and what he was doing, we waved and stopped to chat to him. His name was Simon and he was walking across Canada! I felt going by bicycle was too slow especially during the past few days, and Simon was walking!! It had taken him nearly 4 months since leaving Victoria, and he was thinking another 2 months to Toronto where he was going to wait out winter until continuing to St John’s, Newfoundland. He expected to be in Newfoundland in July 2011!

Simon was a great guy and we had a really good time chatting to him. I asked him about food and supplies and he says he does find it hard to get water sometimes (he stops by people’s houses when he needs to). He usually walks about 30km a day so there are many stretches, especially in this part of Ontario, where he doesn’t come by a store. I also asked him about the Japanese guy who was walking across the country pusing a shopping cart (we heard about him from Mark, Amy and Chris when we met in Sault Ste Marie). Simon had heard about him too, but he said he was probably already in Sudbury by now. I was a little disappointed because it would have been pretty neat to meet him (apparently he is only whereing sandals, and has a huge Japanese flag that you can sign). We must have passed by each other somehow.

Simon is a musician and singer and actually had his guitar shipped to the next city where he is playing. His next venue was Thunder Bay. He sounded disappointed that he hadn’t seen a single bear his entire trip, not even in B.C. But he was surrounded by a pack of coyotes trying to get his food one morning in the praries. He said he had to get his knife out and the coyotes in the end did run away.

I was feeling discouraged lately about biking across the country, while here was Simon walking across the country. Simon really got me motivated again and I was ready to keep on trucking. You can check out Simon’s adventures at his blog by clicking here.

After saying good bye to Simon I kept thinking about what it would be like to walk across Canada. It must be an incredible journey. You would’t have to deal with traffic on the road or with headwind for that matter, but there would be many other challenges I am sure.

Unfortunately once I exhausted thoughts about walking across the country, the trees and rocks started to get me down again. We came to an opening where there was the view of the gradual rolling uphill road. By this time Katherine was about a kilometer ahead of me, and I thought this would make a neat photo so I stopped and got my camera out. After I got a couple pictures, a pick up truck went by, so any more photos would have not looked as good. I then looked over at the rocks. So many rocks, yet I hadn’t taken a good close up photo. I crossed the road to do so, and got a couple photos. I didn’t get too much of a close-up, because to be honest they still looked very boring. We had hardly taken any photos over the last few days, which speaks greatly about the scenery, especially if you know me because I like to take pictures. Then, I noticed the incredible silence. There was no traffic. No noise even in the distance. It was incredible. There was pure silence all around. It was an amazing feeling.

By this point Katherine was quite a ways ahead of me biking up the rolling hills. I decided I better get going so I don’t keep her waiting. That’s when I noticed a black blob attempting to climb a telephone pole about 100m in front of me. It was a black bear! My first thought was “oh crap! It’s just me and the black bear”, but it was far enough away that my first instinct still ended up being getting the camera out instead of bear spray. Next thing I knew there were three cubs crossing the road. I thought to myself, ‘this means mama bear is not going to be happy to see me!’. Then came mama bear following after her cubs. This was when I ended up making a slight noise closing my front bag that she looked at me. Black bears don’t have good eyesight but they have an incredible nose and possibly good hearing (I read about black bears about a month ago at a Home Hardware waiting for our bikes to get looked at..) . It only occured to me later that I was downwind of the bears that they probably didn’t even notice I was there.

After the cub and the mama bear crossed, one of the cubs decides to run back onto the road and to roll around. Mama bear, not pleased, groans and runs back and slaps the cub bear a couple times, appearing to tell it to never do such a thing again. It finally pushes the cub down then runs across the road, quickly followed by the cub. It was an amazing sight, and I was able to get part of it on video (will be posted soon). While this whole event took place I was wide-eyed in amazement. Meeting the tourists was nice, meeting Don and Simon was even better, but this truly was the highlight of the day. It was really amazing to see the bears wait out the traffic to cross. They had only come out when there was pure silence, and to see one of the bears fool around and mama bear teaching the cub a lesson was really neat. Katherine had missed all of this as she didn’t turn around until she was at the top of the hill (although she would have seen me as a tiny speck, and perhaps 4 black blob specks in front of me crossing the road because she was so far ahead).

After giving the bears a couple minutes to get away from the road back in to the forrest, I zoomed downhill and up the hills to catch up to Katherine to tell her the whole event!

The rest of the day involved cycling on flatter and flatter roads, and we made very good progress into Mine Center. Unfortunately, just as Simon had warned us, the only store had closed at 5PM and we got there around 5:40PM. We had enough food so we decided we’ll make a quick stop there in the morning. We cycled around to the campground symbols in Mine Center that was on my GPS. As soon as we stopped at the locations we were swarmed by mosquitos. I had never been to a place where the mosquitos were so many in numbers and so vicious!! One campground was an actual semi-campground, and the other was also called Mine Center Resort but other than a dated sign it did not resemble a campground what-so-ever. We cycled back to the first campground and chatted to the only RV’ers that were at their RV to ask them about the campground. There was no obvious place to pay except for a sign saying $18, and no obvious place to pitch a tent (although we did find the bathroom/laundry/shower building). They said all we had to do was find anywhere to pitch our tent and just go talk to the owners in the house. They keep their RV permanently there were camping all summer. We went down to the lake, and it was incredibly beautiful. We walked back up the hill to find the owner’s house. We met a younger man who was very nice, who said we just had to stop by the store in the morning to pay and that we can pitch the tent wherever we found most suitable.

The mosquitos were absolutely terrible here (they were bad last night too), so we sprayed ourselves with bug spray and set up the tent and cooked and cleaned up as quickly as we could. Afterwards we treed our food and had a very nice hot shower, then ran as fast as we could into our tent! The RV’ers said the bugs hadn’t been that bad all summer, except the last few days they really sprung up. Did they ever (and we thought June and July were suppose to be the worst for bugs)!

Click here for today’s photos

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