Ottawa Sun

Hello again everyone. We have arrived yesterday in Ottawa the capital of our wonderful country. It's wonderful because it has stopped raining and we have everything we can laying around drying out! We are visiting with my cousin Judy and her husband Larry and they are putting us up in their basement suite while we are here. It is just great. Larry toured us around Ottawa last night after supper and this morning the four of us went to garage sales.

What fun and we even bought some stuff and guess what Rick bought himself a "hat". Imagine that, anyone that knows him, do you think he needs that. But its not what you need, its what you want, right! And I got an Xmas ornament, a moose with 4 little snowmen on its back. There goes that want and need again!
Judy and Larry are having some of our family over for dinner tonight and it will be nice to have a visit with everyone and we get to meet their grandson Ethan.

Eganville

We arrived in Eganville at Stu's place at Serenity Bay on Mink Lake, Ontario in the rain at about 5:30 p.m. Stu welcomed us, insisted we stay in the house with him instead of setting up the tent trailer in the rain, thank goodness! What hospitality. We took him out for dinner last night and tonight Rick and I brought the makings for dinner.

It rained pretty well all day and had lots of fog too, so Rick and I drove down to Kingston and had a nice visit with Rick's boyhood friend Les Linstrom and his wife Hilda. We haven't seen them since 2003 when they were visiting his family in summer 2003. They are getting ready for a motor home trip across the USA and up into Canada at the West Coast with another couple.

On the trip back to Stu's we stopped at the Wilton Cheese Factory and picked up some cheese (of course) and cheese curds (mmm good).
It is supposed to be nice for the weekend and we hope to get everything dried out in the tent trailer. Heading into Ottawa in the morning. Looking forward to spending time with my cousins.

BRRR!!

Thought it was going to snow last night. It rained hard most of the night, but around 4 am the wind came up and blew the rain away which was good and the tent dried out before we had to pack up. It was so cold in the morning that we decided to eat out for breakfast, nice HOT coffee!! We are in a campground 7km's west of Sault Ste. Marie tonight and we give it rating of 5. Rained most of the day, and there is not much to see along Lake Superior, trees and rocks and mist over the water. We had lunch at White River where "Winnie the Pooh" is from and the wind almost blew our lunch away. Dinner at Giovanni's Restaurant, it is really too cold to be cooking and washing up outdoors! Tomorrow can only get better! We hope.

Oh no!! Rain!!!

Wait a minute! We aren't on the trike for this trip so that makes it a bit better when it rains. We woke up early this morning to the sound of wind and a little bit of rain, so we decided to pack up and hit the road while the tent trailer was still dry. Good decision as it started raining heavier when we pulled out at 6:15 am. We drove to Kenora for breakfast, we were the only ones in having breakfast so we had a good chat with the waitress and she was a very interesting person to chat with. The rain stayed with us most of the day until around noon. It let up just enough so we stopped at a roadside picnic area and had lunch. We are camped overnight at the Happy Land Park Campground at Thunder Bay.

Irene and I take turns on the net. We stayed in 2001 on our trip across Canada on the Trike. We will give this place a 6 out of 10 for a rating. The trees here are just coming out into bud, shows how late things are this year. It still gets cold at night. We have our electric heater going in the tent trailer and a propane heater in our add a room which makes very comfortable to sit around in.

Hot Air

We got into Moose Jaw around 2:00 pm got all set up at the Oasis campground and then called Dale & Marlene McBain to see what they were up to. They knew we were coming so they said come on over. They gave us the choice of eating in or eating out, yes you guessed it we ate out, how could we not when they mentioned a smokehouse grill place that they knew of. We had a great dinner and then went back to their home for desert. Bill Nickel arrived on his new soft tail Harley. Wow what a beautiful machine, and of course he is very proud of it. We decided to take a detour and go to Rouleau a.k.a "Dog River" Corner Gas TV show. Not much to see but at least we made it there this time as we couldn't last year during the Rally " the Rain & Hail drove us away". Time to head East for Winnipeg. Remember I said "Hot Air"? A friend once told us that when you travel east across the prairies you will get a head wind. Well he was correct. The reason is perhaps the "HOT AIR" coming out from the parliment buildings in Ottawa. Not only did we get poor gas milage but also the price of gas is going up the farther east we go. We camped over night at the Lilac Resort Campground 50 km's east of Winnipeg. We both gave it a 4 out of10 rating, especially the showers, lots of hot water but no place to put anything!

On the Road finally

Wow, it has happened we are on our way to the East Coast pulling our motorcycle trailer the key word here is MOTORCYCLE. We met Joyce, Dennis and Myrna for coffee at Timmies of course. Got on the road at 10 am, next stop Keremeos. Irene wanted to place some flowers on her fathers grave site as it had been 27 years since we were last there. On to Oliver for an over night visit with our friends Brian & Joyce who always make you feel welcome. Brian BBQ'd a chicken and we ate well and drank a little wine. Time to open the pod on the trailer to get something out, ooppps where is the key for the lock, okay this is a motorcyle trailer the key would be with the bike keys that are at home. Brian do you have a bolt cutter?? We have decided to drive to Lethbridge to spend 2 days at the Bridgeview Holiday Trails Resort. South of Cranbrook we came across an accident scene and they were detouring most of the traffic onto a forestry access road called the Highland Road. NO large vehicles. The officer said "that cars were making it through" that should have been our first clue as to the type of road we were going onto. It wasn't too long and we knew why we were missing our JEEP, the road was ugly, but only 20 km long which took us about 1 hour to travel. The GPS was of no use and it did not show even a trail on the map. When we did finally get to Cranbrook it was time for a FREE Iced Cap at Timmies. As we were driving I remembered that we were towing our Motorcyle Trailer and that the Insurance papers with the new decals were where??? of course with the bike insurance papers in the bike. Thanks Joyce for retrieving them and sending them along. The weather here in Lethbridge has been great, lots of SUN. We decided to go and see the movie "Angels and Demons" while we were here. It was well worth seeing and the theatre was packed. On to Moose Jaw in the morning.