We started out under cloud cover, with a low line of light in the west that we drove toward. It wasn’t as dark as it looks here, even through my sunglasses.
See it’s clearing and brighter. We saw several ponds in low spots the glacier sculpted in the bedrock of the Canadian Shield sporting beaver houses, like this (left). The rock mostly dates to the long-ago and enduring Precambrian.
We stopped in North Bay because it is used for many locations for “Cardinal,” a Canadian police detective from books by Giles Blunt, made into a TV series starring Billy Campbell as John Cardinal, also with the excellent Karine Vanasse.
This was historically known as the Rapids of the Upper Ottawa. The many rapids in this section of the Ottawa extending to the west made it time consuming to use this river route (through Lake Nipissing and into Georgian Bay) as a bypass to going all the way through Lake Erie, Lake St Clair, etc. This section was particularly troublesome, and many died in the rough waters. In 1950, these rapids were tamed by the dam at Rapides-des-Joachims some 30 miles downstream. They look placid now, ¿no?
With dusk, the half-moon is brilliant. Pardon. [Nous sommes au Québec maintenant.] La demi-lune est brillante.
6 October 2019 at 8:32 am
kayak woman says:
Before my brother was born, my family took a Long Trip. We visited our friends the Shermans near Niagara Falls and the Halliday sisters in Toronto (would have to look up my relationship to them but I have vague memories of tea in their parlor or whatever). And I forget exactly what else BUT… We spent our first night on the road in a motel in North Bay. I was thrilled that the bathroom fixtures (tub/toilet, etc.) were PINK!!! Many years later, mom and I were talking about that trip and what SHE remembered about the pink bathroom was… dun dun dun… a HUGE SPIDER! Mom did not like spiders.