We woke early to find that the mosquitoes had not vanished overnight. We made a quick exit from the campground and stopped at the town store to pay for our night and to stock up on food for the ride into Fort Frances. The two people working at the general store agreed that the mosquitoes were the worst they had ever seen them in August.
We cycled into Fort Frances, enjoying views of Rainy Lake along the way. We crossed the causeway into Fort Frances and had an exciting construction experience. They had closed one side of the causeway for construction and had installed automatic lights to control traffic on the narrow side that was left. Each red light lasted 3 minutes. Now, it should be said that there is a huge sawmill in Fort Frances and lots of logging happening on Highway 11 and that this is the only road that connects the two spots. We had already learned all about logging trucks and the perils that came with them…including flying bark and more “suction” than your average truck when they pass. Now we were faced with a situation where they were lined up behind us for a single lane stretch of road about a kilometre in length. You would think that this would not end well.
It actually went really well as it turns out that logging trucks are really slow to get going so we just pedalled fast down the road and managed to get through without any problems by “taking” the lane. After the single lane stretch, we let everyone else pass us.
We headed into Fort Frances proper and passed a really cool looking fly-in outposts plane outfit. I took some pictures of Adam being run over by the planes on the lawn. Most of the cars in the parking lot of the seaplane business were cars from the US.
We had lunch at the gorgeous waterfront park where it appeared that you could camp for free. Unfortunately, we had a tailwind and decided to press on for the day.
We checked out the waterfront on the way into town and it was super nice. They have a bike trail along the entire way, right up to the hospital and sawmill (which are right next to each other…rather convenient, I thought). It was gorgeous. They have a logging tugboat and a cold war era communication tower on display but it seemed you needed a code to go on to them…however there were no instructions posted on how to get the code…we later learned from our friends at Safeway that you had to go to City Hall and pay $3 and they would give you the code.
It had been a long time since we had seen the inside of a “real” grocery store (Thunder Bay, I think) and we were desperate for some fresh food. We stopped at the Safeway and met two ladies out front who offered to watch our bikes so we could go shopping together. This was super, since we usually split up and use radios to communicate. The store even had tables outside to hang out at and a Starbucks!! I was in heaven!!
When we came out of the store, the two ladies wanted to know what we bought and were quite surprised to learn that we actually didn’t necessarily eat super healthy! We started chatting about our trip and were joined by Michel, the window cleaner from the store. He told us all about the fall fair in Emo (30kms west) and said that we should check it out as we went through. We also discussed a bit of Quebec politics. One of the ladies, Ruth, gave us the phone numbers for her sister in Emo and her friends in Nestor Falls in case we needed anything on the way through. She also promised to check our our blog 🙂 Thank you Ruth! We found Fort Frances very friendly, even at the drug store, everyone wanted to know where we were going and wished us well on our travels.
We wanted to take advantage of the tailwind and headed out of town as soon as we could, although it still proved to be a stop of a couple of hours. We headed down Highway 11, despite there being a side road that was paved as it added another 10 kilometers to what was already going to be long day. We went right through Emo (sorry Michel!), although we did see the fairground in the distance.
The terrain had finally flattened out and we were making 30+ km/h. It was really fun for a while and then we started getting quite tired. We made the turn onto Highway 71 and started headed north towards a campground that was listed on Adam’s GPS as being in Little Pine Lake. We got closer and closer to the campground and there was no sign…I was getting a little worried. Finally, we saw one indicating it was a mile down the road. We got to the turn-off that the GPS indicated and there was no sign, but at 144kms for the day we definitely did not want to go further so we headed down the gravel sideroad.
We then arrived at an oasis of a campground! The family that runs it were eating dinner when we arrived but they registered us and told us to go set up on the point of land out in the lake. We did and made stir fry right at the edge of the lake. We did some laundry and, when the washing machine broke, the owners threw it into theirs to finish up and then came down the hill to get the change to throw it into the dryer! What amazing service! Apparently the children of the owners used to run a motel down the road and they were running the campground as a bit of a retirement business. They even set off fireworks at the end of the evening (well one of the campers did, calling us “bicycle people” when he warned us they were going off…) and we got to watch from our tent!
Trip Around The World 
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