June 3 to June 6, 2008

En Route from Sudbury, Ontario, to Gimli, Manitoba
Roger's sister and brother-in-law (the same one who created the die for the lunchboxes) have a cottage in the woods just north of Sudbury. We have all the tools we think are necessary to find the spot where they told us to park the bus. We have a GPS that we call Betty. We have a hand drawn map. Unfortunately, we read the map upside down. Not a good thing when you have a 40-foot motorhome that is 60 feet long with the towed car attached. The tow bar does not allow us to back up. We will only fit in certain parking lots. Our publicist, Nelson calls to let us know that we must make a stop on our way passing through Sault Ste Marie for a photo opportunity with the local paper. This call comes just as we are approaching the designated pull off. We miss the stop. The GPS screams that we should turn around which is impossible. Just to add to the confusion, there is clutter around us. Maps in various stages of unfolding and a tangle of cords from the GPS, the satellite radio, the tire pressure sensor, the auxiliary brake monitor, the cell phone charger, and the Blackberry charger. It is not pretty. Our road crew follows us, blindly. They can park anywhere in their 22 foot RV. We find a motel restaurant parking lot where we will fit. Lamont goes into the dining room to ask permission to park the big rig there for a short period of time while we climb into the smaller motorhome for the drive up the long, narrow road to the cottage. "We're The Cooking Ladies," Lamont tells the two women working in the restaurant. "So are we," they reply. But, we know we are the true cooking ladies because we have had dinner cooking in the slow cooker on the counter of the motorhome since we left Sudbury. In eight hours when we stop in Wawa for the night, our barbecue beef dinner will be ready.

The bugs are well represented as we walk down the long path to and from Bev and Al's cottage. Many of them deposit themselves on the motorhome windshield as we drive to Sault Ste Marie and beyond. By the time we get to Pancake Bay, we are looking through small openings between the bug splats. Our road crew needs gas in their RV so we stop to wait for them in the large parking lot and someone comes over with a ladder and washes our windshield. Makes us feel a little badly that we don't need to fuel up just yet.

A mile north of Pancake Bay we have a fresh batch of bug corpses covering the windshield.

Roger cleaning the windshield in Wawa.

Pretty northwestern Ontario Scenery along the shore of Lake Superior...

On June 4 we stopped in White River, Ontario, for donuts and coffee and a casual visit to the Spadoni's Home Hardware Building Centre. Someone saw us at the donut shop and called the Home Hardware store to say they saw us in town. When we emerged from the donut shop, Wilma and Vaugh were waiting for us in the parking lot. We drove the motorhome to their store and all the employees came out to greet us. Tara, Lois, Linda, Shauna. And also Nancy and Lana came over from the town office where they were doing an economic assessment of White River because the sawmill is shut down. Spadoni's is 103 years old. One section of the store was part of Wilma's grandmother's dining room. They kept the fireplace and built around it.

We left White River and continued our journey along the north shore of Lake Superior. Our destination for the night was the Thunder Bay KOA.

On the morning of June 5 we had a 60 minute in-studio live interview with Bob McDonald on CFPR RADIO in Thunder Bay. It was talk radio at it's finest. Listeners called in to inform us where and what to eat in Thunder Bay. There were recipe questions and cooking tips. We learned that the people of Thunder Bay take pride in their city and their food. Did you know that Thunder Bay is famous for a large oval shaped bun with pink icing called a persian? It originated in Thunder Bay and according to the locals it is still exclusive to the area. Joe Nucci heard us on the radio and delivered fresh persians to the station for us from his bakery. Yum!

Several listeners urged us to have a Stanley burger at the Stanley Hotel off the highway. There were two locations that we could get the best coney dogs. The Chinese restaurants serve bon bons which are really spare ribs. The Hoito is the best place for pancakes. One caller suggested we try a toasted Persian, "slice it in half, put the bottom on the top with the icing in the centre like a sandwich, and fry it like grilled cheese." Others gave us cooking tips such as steaming wieners in 7 UP and using 7 UP instead of water for making pie crust. In what seemed like minutes, the hour was over.

As we were leaving the studio, photojournalist, Kristi St. Cyr interviewed us for Thunder Bay television (TBTV).
We drove the car back to the KOA campground to pick up the motorhome and our road crew. The moose must be bad in Thunder Bay when the highway signs are this large. We mentioned on the radio that we planned to make a stop at Memorial Home Hardware Building Centre before we left Thunder Bay. However, our departure from the campground was delayed when two bikers road up to have their photos taken with us. We had met John and Sherry Fewer at Pancake Bay (remember the place with the bugs on the windshield?) and again at a scenic pull-over the day before. Sherry is an RCMP officer and John owns an Inuit art gallery in London, Ontario. They were on a circular tour of Lake Superior on their motorcycles.

By the time we drove into the parking lot of Memorial Home Hardware Building Centre in Thunder Bay they had our arrival announced on the marque. With us everything happens at once. We just had time to park the motorhome in the parking lot and turn off the engine before the cell phone rang with a scheduled live radio telephone interview. Then we were passed over to a sister station for an unscheduled interview. A man who heard us on CFPR RADIO earlier had followed us to the parking lot to warn us that we could have a problem getting the big rig turned around in the Stanley Hotel parking lot if we decided to go there and have the stanley burgers for lunch. And there was a woman jumping up and down in the parking lot beside the motorhome waving our cookbook "Recipes from the Road" in the air. She had heard us on the radio and had been waiting two hours for us to arrive at the Home Hardware store so she could have her cookbook signed.

We received a wonderful reception from the people in Thunder Bay.

And for an unscheduled stop, our visit to Memorial Home Hardware Building Centre was pretty exciting!

We left Thunder Bay for Fort Frances, Ontario, as a stop over for the night on our way to Gimli, Manitoba. Ruth's sister, Dorothy lives in Fort Frances. While we settled into the municipal camground and put our feet up, Roger and Ruth went out for a late dinner with Dorothy.

Early the next morning (June 6) we set out for the Manitoba border. About an hour into our journey Ruth got the phone call that her mother had died. Roger and Ruth made reservations to fly from Winnipeg to Toronto. We now had to get them to the airport on time. We also had their RV as well as our RV to drive down the highways until their return. Driving them to the airport would have meant leaving both RVs in a huge parking lot on the outskirts of Winnipeg and unhooking the towed car. This would have worked except for the timing. It just would have taken too long and we didn't want them to miss their flight. We called Lamont's cousin, Marilyn in Winnipeg and she came to the rescue. She met us at the Petro Canada station on the ring road on the outskirts of Winnipeg and wisked our road crew off to the airport in just the nick of time.

We each got behind the wheel of one of the motorhomes and continued out journey to Gimli with plans to drive the two motorhomes down the road for as long as it takes for our road crew to catch up with us again.