Not a lot to talk about today (aren’t you glad!), as we spent the day driving from Wawa to Thunder Bay.

It’s only 285 miles, but due to the curves and hills they keep the speed limit down to 56mph, and about 1/3 of the time that’s too fast. We also encountered some construction that slowed us down. It was a good day for driving as we had the first daytime rain of the trip (had a few overnight showers).

Our big stop of the day was in the town of White River. Back in 1914 a Lieutenant in the Canadian service (he was a vet taking care of horses), bought a black bear cub to keep as a mascot for the soldiers. He gave it a name after his hometown of Winnipeg, and called it Winnie. After being in England for a while he decided to leave Winnie in the care of the London Zoo as he was deploying to France (during WWI).  Winnie became a huge hit at the zoo, and when he returned from France, he decided to leave the bear at the zoo. One of the people who enjoyed seeing Winnie was author A.A. Milne and his son Christopher. Winnie lived at the zoo for over 20 years, but his legend lives to this day.

The only other thing of note today were the power lines we saw along our way. Brian’s mind wanders into strange places while driving and the thought about someone clear cutting about a block wide area of forest for well over 250 miles and erecting thousands of transmission towers to move power across Ontario kind of blew his mind. Just imagine the number of man hours and how hard the work must have been. Between the bugs, rough terrain, isolation and physical strain, the workers must have been as hardy as the lumberjacks back in the day. Many of the towers were bolted to the bedrock, but they used tons of concrete for areas were the rock was too uneven or missing. Must have been quite the project.