Thursday, August 9, 2012

Canada 2012

This year we ventured out beyond our normal excursion to Wawa, Ontario.  We crossed the border at the Thousand Island area of New York heading to Quebec.  We elected to return to Quebec, after a 12 years lapse it was time for a return visit.  Our objective was to go up the James Bay Road to Chisasibi, Quebec, but that got changed due to a problem with our generator.  We made it to La Verendrye Provincial Park and enjoyed the peacefulness of the park.  French speaking Quebec was not much of a challange to us on this trip as it was 12 years ago.  We found that the French were happy we were there, maybe the economy had some influence but it was a pleasure on this trip.  La Verendrye is about 4 hours north of Ottawa and the road there was fair but not great, more than plenty of road construction was underway on this trip.  We stayed 4 nights and our generator died on the 3rd night, I spent most of the fourth day trying to figure it out but I'm not a wrench turner so it was sort of beyond my abilities.  We had planned to visit a client west of Ottawa to conduct an appraisal on his Blue Bird so off we went because we thought we were going to have to return home.  Once we made it to Perth, our client & friend Jim Doel had a look and asked his mechanic Dave to check it out.  Within 2 hours we had power again so we were on the road again.  It turned out to be as simple as a bad generator start switch.  The generator has 4 start switches and the remote control panel switch was the villian.  We looked at the map and decided we would visit Algonquin Provincial Park.  Algonquin to us was a lot of like being at Yellowstone here in the states, way too many visitors.  As in Yellowstone if you want to see wildlife just watch for parked cars and the tourist on the side of the road.  Three nights was enough for Algonquin, we stayed at the Campground of Two Rivers, it was nice, well appointed enough to meet our needs but way too many campers.  We departed for Killbear Provincial Park near Parry Sound.  This is a different story and one difficult for us to grasp.  Killbear has a rattlesnake and it is on the endangered list so they have erected a 2 foot high fence to direct these snakes to an ecopass under the road so the snakes can travel freely; what not roadkill snakes?  Hummm what about the snakes in the campground, lucky we never had to find out.  Fran said 2 days was enough in Killbear so we were off to MacGreager Point Provincial Point another park on Lake Huron, for a couple nights then it was on down to Point Farms Provincial Park.  Point Farms is north of Goderich, Ontario which got hit hard by a tornado last year while we were there.  Goderich was nearly wiped out so we wanted to return to see how it was coming along with the rebuild.  We were happy with the progress.  Goderich will once again be the prettiest town in Ontario.  We stayed 3 nights at Point Farms and when we left we headed to Elkhart, Indiana to look for a new fridge for the bus.  Middleberry Indiana has a nice KOA if you are ever in the area and is only a few miles from Elkhart.  Elkhart is always full due to so many visiters returning to the RV plants for service & warranty work.  Shipshewana Indiana is another nice town you would have to visit and the Blue Gate Resturant is out of this world with authentic Amish cooking it is a must.