A Few Days of Canadian Wandering:

 Baby took us north through Maine, New Hampshire, and a corner of Vermont, where she crossed into Canada at a very quiet and pleasant crossing.  Truly, there was a bit of a sense of relief to be out of the chaos for a while.  

We wandered as we went, stopping just here and there until we got to Ottawa.  (Sorry, David and Vera, we didn't get to Montreal and we feel very sad about that.)  Time for Baby to rest, us to eat a restaurant meal, and just see a little of Parliament Hill. Washington DC is now full of fences and National Guard Troops, and Parliament Hill is full of families  out on a Sunday afternoon in a beautiful park. What we've lost here in Washington was palpable. 

Plant based lunch was easy to find as was a street market and a little street art.  Great stop -- we'd love to come back some day with more time:

In North Bay, Ontario, we found this bedraggled old turtle along a bike path by a creek: 

She should be a little weary; She's representing Grandmother Moon and she's  been holding Turtle Island (North America) on her back since before time began in the N'Bishing Anishinaabeg creation tradition.   She has 13 plates, or scutes, comprising  her shell representing the 13 full lunar cycles of the year, and the 28 plates around the edge represent the 28 days of each cycle. There are seven stones (hard to see) piled in the center representing the seven Grandfather Teachings:  love, honor, honesty, respect, wisdom, truth and humility.   The turtle's head in the foreground is facing due east. 

What you can't see in the photo are four tall posts representing the cardinal directions, and describing the circle of life.  She's facing east, which represents infancy, the physical body, and spring, and so on around the circle. 

  

The teachings of the aboriginal inhabitants of our continent always seem so straightforward, intuitively good, and direct, a good simple way to live.  The moral compass faces due north.  

Our last stop in Canada:   Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.  We parked on the shores of the Saint Mary's River that separates Ontario from Michigan and connects Lake Superior and Lake Huron.  There are three (soon to be four) locks on the river, only one of which belongs to Canada.  The locks are there for water craft to navigate the 125' height difference between the two lakes. Sault St. Marie, Ontario  lines the river edge with lovely, busy parks, walking trails, and boardwalks, themselves dotted with lilacs and hanging baskets.

 The path led us to the single Canadian lock. Much older than the American locks, it is too small to be used for anything but pleasure crafts - anything from kayaks to yachts. We watched a boat enter the chamber from the lower Lake Huron and the downstream gates close behind it.  And ahead of it -- the boat is trapped in the lock chamber.  It has  nothing to do but wait for water from the upstream side to enter the lock chamber, lifting the boat to the level of Lake Superior. 

 

We had to laugh at the idea that there's a drain that will literally drain Lake Superior into the lock chamber.  Can you find the duck in the corner staying away from it?

The volume of Lake Superior is in the neighborhood of 3 quadrillion gallons, or that's what Wikipedia told me.  The lock chamber can hold just over a million gallons.  Good thing there's a lock operator on duty to close that valve:

The lock operator let me photograph the controls buttons for the lock, but not himself.  Otherwise a very friendly fellow who told me all the dumb things tourists like us do, while Bill walked across the lock atop the upstream miter (mitre in Canada) gates. 

Just to finish the story, this quite fancy boat essentially travelled about 125 feet UP to reach the level of Lake Superior.  The lock operator pushed the right button,  opened the upstream gates  and the yacht sailed on past us on its way.    

The freighter ships (lakers) of the great lakes are long and skinny.  This anatomy allows them to fit in all the locks of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway.  And  this is Mike-- a fellow I met at the Aune Osborne Campground in Sault St. Marie, Michigan.  As you can see from his hat he's a Drone Pilot (in a hobby sort of way) photographing the lakers . 

He not only let me watch the drone fly, he taught me a lot about it. (Santa, are you listening to my silent wishes for one of my own?)  He has a US license to fly it and it has a distance, determined by its battery life, of six miles.  He said he's never challenged the battery because if you are flying over water you better know that your drone is still in the air.  He also recommended a book to us about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a laker that in its day was the biggest and best there was, but that broke in half (remember the long skinny shape) and sank in stormy  waters  on November 10th, 1975. Just 17 miles from a Michigan port, the ship and its entire crew was lost.  We've learned from our travels around the great lakes that there's a adage:  Lake Superior never gives up her dead.  Evidently it is too deep and too cold.  The title of the book is The Gales of November, by John U. Bacon (2025). 

 We've been asked what we do while driving in the van.   One of the things is for sure listening to books.  The Gales of November has kept us captivated for miles and miles of driving. Y'all probably know the Gordon Lightfoot song about this ship, too: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI

Here's the bridge across the St. Mary's River that crosses the US/Canadian border,  where we have buried the lede.

The very unpleasant crossing back into the United States from the very pleasant Canada is on the other side of this bridge. We had to present our passports.  Our US passports.  Because we are US citizens.

It seems we had some contraband avocados, tomatoes and some nasty, dried up limes in our fridge, which were confiscated.  That's really OK with us -- it they aren't good for US agriculture we were happy to turn them over and certainly didn't hide them.  There was no adversarial conversation.  Nonetheless Bill and I were separated from Baby Beluga, threatened with fines if we would have been found to lie, sent into a separate room with directions to leave our phones in the van (thus no pictures), and questioned for the second time about where we were going (home?) and more importantly why (?).  Our van and its fridge were searched without us present by a really stern and mean border patrol agent.  His search returned a small cardboard grocery store tray with a few cherry tomatoes, a regular tomato, an avocado and the two old limes.  All those veggies had already been cut into a salad (except the old neglected limes) that they didn't take.  Seems like they were just making a point -- what Bill has called 'playing gotcha' rather than protecting agriculture.

  Here's a Wikimedia image of the crossing.   We were directed through the far right lane.

WOYAYA