Even in the Midwest, a bit of new ground; PS about yesterday

A couple of days back I said I won't really hit new territory until after Minneapolis. Well, that isn't quite true.

The Toyota dealer in Bowmansville got Penny in and out in just an hour, so I was on the road about 9 a.m. They even gave her a bath - good thing because she was covered with grime, birds**t, and bug spatter. Not that you're likely to be driving a Toyota in a Toronto suburb that much, but if you need service these guys are the best.

But then I hit Toronto rush hour. The approximately 10 westbound express and "collector" lanes of Highway 401 were a huge parking lot. Between facing one of my few deadlines for this trip (noon tomorrow in Indiana), forgetting that said deadline is Central time so I have an extra hour, and getting tired of looking at the back ends of cars and trucks going nowhere, I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for exploring Ontario.

A look at the Ontario map provided a bit of inspiration: I had never seen Lake Huron. My childhood was spent around Lake Michigan - Indiana and Michigan state parks in the dunes; the lakefronts of Chicago, Gary, Michigan City, and points between. Nancy and I lived in Duluth overlooking Lake Superior and once took the Pelee Island ferryboat across Lake Erie from Sandusky to Ontario. I've been on both the U.S. and Canadian shores of Lake Ontario, but never even close to the fifth Great Lake, Huron, until today.

So I detoured off the expressway (by now I was on 402 well north of 401) toward a dot on the map called Port Franks to take some pictures. I turned down one rural road after another (oddly called "lines" in this area, as "Thompson Line") and occasionally caught glimpses of blue water through low trees, but every road ended in a "Private Property" sign. Finally I found a small county road ending at the spot you see here, a lawn about the size of my living room - I have no idea where I was, but probably west of Port Franks, for which I never saw a sign. Not much to look at except that the grass and small trees are typical of all my sightings of the lake: I found no dunes or beaches.

About 15 km later I was in a single long line of cars snaking up the bridge from Sarnia, ON, to Port Huron, MI - much more confidence-inspiring than the one at Cornwall except when the whole roadbed, 100 feet up in the air, trembled as 18-wheelers passed by in the other two lanes. Commerce is king at border crossings, apparently, while the human cargoes of private vehicles waited our turn for an hour and a quarter - coincidentally the exact amount of time my GPS said the 401/402 route would save me over boring old I-90. All that time in parking gear did give me a chance to snap some photos of the lake at the point where it enters the St. Clair River, the international border. This one shows the point on the Michigan side.

I have also never seen much of Michigan beyond the southwest corner and some bits around Detroit. Tonight I'm in Battle Creek of Kellogg's cereals and boxtops fame. My hotel is next to I-84 and I haven't yet found a reason to head downtown tomorrow.

PS about yesterday

Dinner last night was weird and fun (and delicious), but I left it out of yesterday's post because I had forgotten the name of the little pub where I ate and couldn't find it online. The pub, in a tiny strip mall that shares the parking lot of the Howard Johnson hotel where I stayed, is called "Only Fools & Horses" and is owned by a couple - the husband, whose name I forget, is the son of a Scots father and a Maltese mother, and Eva's German. Their customers are neighbors and friends, and so was I almost as soon as I sat down. This means being asked to read and admire his latest e-mail diatribe to a government minister (they're Harper fans, alas), getting ribbed about anything that comes to mind - in my case mainly about being "American" - and returning the insults with interest, and being on a first-name basis with everyone in the place - five of us most of the time. Oh, and the barbecued chicken with fries was delicious but the local pale ale was insipid. I never thought to ask what the place's name means but Wikipedia says it's the title of a British sitcom drawn from a 19th-century saying: "only fools and horses work for a living."