This one took us across the entire width of the Adirondack Park, into Canada over the Ogdensburg bridge and into Ottawa. Although small in comparison to many capital cities, Ottawa is a great place to visit and offers a great education of the history of Canada by visiting their capital buildings…and the food is great.

When we left Ottawa, we drove north west to the city of Sudbury.  What a surprise. The size of the city and the bustling commerce really caught us off guard. Unknown to us, Sudbury is a mining town with the world’s largest deposits of nickel ore. Gold and other minerals are also mined in the area, but not to nearly the same level of importance.

Next we drove along a stretch of the Trans Canadian Highway until we reached Sault St. Marie.

There are really two towns with the same name, one in Canada and one across the narrow St. Mary’s River in the United States, a lot like Kansas City, Mo. and Kansas City, Ka.

Anyway, this is where the trip really got interesting. We drove out along the northeastern shore line of Lake Superior toward the town of Wawa. I’m not kidding, that’s the name of the town.

Wawa as in…Wawa. Point is that nothing along this stretch was any more interesting than the name of the town…except Lake Superior.

I had never before seen any part of this largest of the Great Lakes and I’ve got to tell you, I was blown away. I’ve stood on the shores of Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and Lake Michigan and I’ve been impressed.  But when you stand on the shore of this lake, something creeps into the back of your mind that says “don’t mess with me!” This is a monster of a lake. When you look out to the north and west, all you can see is water and the curve of the earth.

The next day we drove out to White Fish Point on the southern shore of the lake. This is where the famous ship the Edmund Fitzgerald sank. And, when you visit the museum there, you will find out that it wasn’t the only ship that went down in Lake Superior, more than 500 went down over the years and many of them very close to this area.

The museum itself is worth the drive to this otherwise very remote area. We were very surprised to see the number of cars in the parking lot when we arrived. But, once again, the dominant feature was the lake.  The word HUGE does not encompass what your eyes are asking your brain to absorb. More than 1,300 feet deep, it is the coldest of all the lakes and can spawn waves of over 30 feet…30 feet, that’s what took the Fitzgerald to the bottom.  It is truly a fresh water ocean. Just imagine, the Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the total fresh water in the world. 

If you place 10 glasses of drinking water on your table, two would represent the Great Lakes and the other eight the rest of the planet.

Another little fact that blew my mind, if a raindrop of water entered the head waters of Lake Superior today, in the year 2008, it would be the same day of the same month in the year 2408 before it reached the Atlantic Ocean. Four hundred years!  That’s how massive the amount of water is in the five lakes and demonstrates how big Lake Superior really is. Four hundred years!

That’s just about as long as it took my ex-mother-in-law to tell me for the first time that she liked me.

You might be able to tell by this article that I totally enjoyed this trip.  Besides being with my best friend, the wilderness and wildlife we saw was bordering on transporting us to the Arctic zone.

Looking out over some of the plains we drove through revealed to me that this was an area that winter commanded and that summer was allowed to come for only a very short visit.

One last thing, to our Ottawa tour guide from Yellow Knife, you did your hometown proud.

See you outdoors!

Dick Totino can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it