#17 Thunder Bay, Ontario

# 17  Thunder Bay

We dined our first night in Thunder Bay at The Keg.  Like the A&W, the Keg doesn’t seem to be found in the states.  I was looking for a balanced meal of good food and I was not disappointed.  Our meal exceeded delicious!

The second and third nights we ate at Hotoi.  We were so looking forward to eating here. Perhaps it is enough to know that out of 3 nights in Thunder Bay, we ate here twice.  During our last stay we ate here three out of six nights.

The Hotoi originally provided a place for young Finnish workers to get food like home, and speak their language with other young workers.  The restaurant still serves authentic Finnish food.  However, we come for the pancakes!  YUM !!!   Then we top off the meal with rice pudding.  Each couple shared a double scoop of pudding.   Derrille and I had blueberry sauce on ours, while Lynn and Jay chose strawberry.

In the past, three small towns sat along this bay of Lake Superior. They decided to come together and name the new town after the bay…Thunder Bay. 

This old port town rises up the hillsides from the lake. We spent six days here before exploring the area.  This trip Thunder Bay represented a place to meet up with Lynn and Jay and check our rigs and supplies for the trip east.  We had no plans to explore.  Now that Thunder Bay was the end of trip because of my cancer diagnosis, plans changed.

I thought this was an interesting apartment building. The houses may give you an idea of what homes look like here.

We used our “extra” day to explore the waterfront.  The rain fell in showers as we set off. First stop of course was Tim Horton's.  To our dismay, we chose a smaller shop with limited wares.  However, that didn’t stop us from finding something yummy to enjoy!  Derrille even found a newspaper sports page.

Boulevard Lake flows to Superior and goes right under this main street. On the west side of the Lake is a walking trail that Jay and Derrille have enjoyed in the past.

The creek flows under the waterfront road and out to Lake Superior. We liked how it looked.

Nearly all of the waterfront property is fenced off for industrial use and small companies like this seaplane office.

Huge grain elevators waited for sea going vessels to take their grain to market. This Richardson sign triggered a memory from Saskatchewan.  We passed the Richardson Inland Terminal up by the Battlefords.  As our waiter Erik said, farmers move their grain from their personal silos, to the Inland Terminal, who moves it to the Lake Superior terminal and then on to the world. I found it interesting to see the various stages of the grain transport business.

Check out these geese near the tracks.  We came to the end of the road and had to turn around and retrace our route. The geese were still there. On closer examination they were chowing down on bits of grain, supposed dropped by the trains moving into the dock area.

Multiple railroad tracks move goods to and from the port.

Some grain elevators looked new and others resembled derelicts from another time.

Tucked away in a small corner of unclaimed land we found this little park. It wound away from the shore and provided places for running and working out.

Another little park sat across the tracks from town. Some kinds of emergency fair was happening as we drove by.  We did find this marina on the far side.

We parked for a few minutes and took in the views between raindrops. 

The road led us across a bridge with fish sculptures on both sides. The next bridge apparently put us on an island.

 

Spotting deer made our
day! We counted into the double digits as we drove around this island. We tried carefully to not count the same deer twice.

At the end of the road we came to a Conservation Area, called Mission Island Marsh. If it hadn’t been so wet, we probably would have explored the area.

The Thunder Bay Rowing Club were holding a racing meet.  We drove in for a peek.
We ended up meandering around Thunder Bay for about 3 hours.  Then it was back to the Hoito for dinner. YUM!

Tomorrow we begin our trek back to Bremerton.