Waterton Lakes to Sandpoint, Idaho

We left Waterton Lakes Tuesday morning, stopping at Pearl’s Café for my cup of coffee (and Liam and Kai’s hot chocolate without and with whipped cream and the pastries looked good so we had one too and so it went with the cinnamon buns).  We entered the United States at the point where Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park meets Glacier National Park in Montana. 

Glacier is one of the places to which we will return.  There were some obstacles to getting there.  We received our most thorough interrogation by a border patrol officer in all the multiple times we’ve crossed.  He wanted to know all of the places we’d been since entering Canada, who was in the car and how we were related to each other.  I immediately forgot.  Fortunately Eric didn’t. (I know what you're thinking: why not just give him a link to this blog?  If only I had thought of that).      

We thought we were home free once we entered Montana, until we encountered the next obstacle:

I decided to take the bull by the horns.  I rolled down my window and yelled “Excuse me!”  Heads turned, but the road remained cowful.  I thought to myself, “when in Rome…” and shouted “Moo!”  Nothing.  Eric rolled down his window and politely but firmly said “Mooooove!” and they ambled into the other lane.  Glacier here we come. 

       

People told us Glacier is stunning but they didn’t mention that it has a personality.  We entered the park on a beautiful sunny day and drove up and up and up to a lookout point over the lake.  Here’s the lake just after we got out of the car.  Serene, no?

We turned to look the other way toward the tops of the mountains.  Something had really pissed them off.

Then a wind blew down like a door slamming.  Liam hightailed it into the car before it whisked him over the edge of the lookout.  The wind threw parking lot gravel into my hair and against the car and tried to tear the bikes off the roof rack.  It picked up the lake water and scattered it across the surface like a giant Jackson Pollack.  I was afraid to open the car door because of the sand and debris beating sideways against the car. 

It took less than five minutes for the lake to go from serene and sleepy to wild and angry, its back up and hair standing on end.  

We turned the car into the wind and drove up the road into the shelter of the trees just as the rain hit.  As we rounded a corner, a bear galloping down the mountain flashed across the road just in front of us and disappeared into the trees.  It turned its head to look at our oncoming car.  Fortunately, I had the camera in my hands.  It was on and pointing right toward the front window.  

It never occurred to me to use it. 

That’s all I have to say about Glacier, because it was so beautiful that we are going to come back and stay for a week.  We stopped once more to see one of the waterfalls, and Liam took this shot:

Then we drove and drove to Sandpoint, Idaho where Eric’s cousin Fred and his wife Tracy live, the lucky dogs.

-Juliet

Waterton Lakes

Monday morning I ran along the campground path to the Waterton Lakes waterfall and couldn’t figure out why I was so breathless until I remembered the elevation.  Thinking about being a mile above sea level gives me vertigo and an urge to lie down so as not to fall into the ocean.  At least that was my excuse for making it an easy run.

Canada is at the forefront of the local and sustainable movement.  It seems Waterton Lakes has taken this to heart through local and sustainable campground security.  Liam snapped this photo in Pearl’s Café of an ad for the local attack deer that guard the campground.  

Notice the steely set of the mouth, the muscular ears, the bulbous nose, the glint in the eyes, the razor-sharp teeth crushing the life out of the flower.  The triangular graphic in the lower left illustrates these creatures' technique for handling intruders.  Three of them patrolled past our tent this morning – a big one and two smaller ones in training.  

Here’s the actual sign in its position next to the river that runs through the camp.  

Look closely at the area surrounding the sign -- notice the absence of intruders?   

Actually, one of the rangers told us that last year she was attacked by a deer she surprised bedded down in the middle of town.  As the deer was rearing and stomping at her, the ranger kicked her in the chest to get away.  The deer in Waterton have been known to attack unleashed dogs, tourists they think are threatening the fawns, and campers who go too long without washing their socks.  Camping has been a great incentive for me to keep up with my running - now I think of it as practice.

Monday afternoon we hiked up to Bear’s Hump, which is sort of a lower lookout point before the much higher peaks.  The woman at the Visitor Centre told us it was a lovely but steep hike that would take us a half hour.  I don’t know what happy time zone she lives in, but it took us about 3 hours.  It also took five years off my knees and nearly killed the dog.  Nice view.       

After that we visited Red Rock Canyon (so named because of the red color of the rocks and the canyon-like nature of the canyon).  

The creek that runs through it is icy cold, so on a hot sunny day like the day we were there, everyone takes their shoes off and wades in it.   

 I jumped into the freezing water of Waterton Lakes (voluntarily, without being pushed or bribed) for a swim before dinner.  Liam and Kai have been amusing themselves by learning how to skip rocks in the lake and poking sticks down the entrance to the ground squirrel burrows. 

Another beautiful night under the Canadian stars, much of which I spent in the car writing my book-chapter-from-hell.  

-Juliet

Blue Lake Provincial Park to Waterton Lakes

At Blue Lake Provincial Park on Thursday we dined on honey mustard chicken, spiced couscous and black beans cooked over our one burner stove.  Since Liam and Kai have become vegetarians, Eric and I got dibs on the chicken, except for the two little pieces that Kai had just to taste it.  And the other two pieces he had after that. 

The next morning we saw a bald eagle flying over the treetops near the lake.  The eagles are thick as flies around here.  You practically have to elbow your way through them just to go for a swim.

We had a long day’s drive to Carberry, Manitoba which is very flat.  It’s so straight and flat that I tried taking my hands off the wheel and found that I could go quite a ways before driving into the ditch.  So I got a lot done while driving – talked to Eric, pondered the wisdom of my life’s choices, looked for ice cream signs.  Braided my hair, folded the laundry, wrote my book chapter.  Ok, not really but it was two days of straightaway with lots of big sky.  It was a bit like being in a Flintstone cartoon where the background scenery strip changes from wheat to hay to cows to horses and back to potted plants. 

Saturday night we stayed at Spruce Woods Provincial Park and then took off for Swift Current, Saskatchewan where we stayed in a Best Western.  After all the camping, sleeping in a hotel was odd.  We missed the breeze and the crickets and the nearness of trails and lakes and trees.  Kai woke up in the middle of the night and told me he was going outside to look at the stars. 

There is, however, something quite lovely about sleeping in a bed.  And swimming in a hotel pool turned up to 84 degrees.

Liam and Kai have been reading the Little House on the Prairie series in the car.  

Some parts are more interesting than others.  

It's great to be reading about life on the prairie while actually on the prairie.  It’s odd to be hurtling across the prairie in a horseless carriage with the railroad already built, the locusts and wolves alive only as stories, and the grasslands reconstituted as a vast outdoor food factory.  

We stopped in Tompkins at a reconstruction of a sod house so that Liam and Kai could see what Laura, Mary, Ma, Pa, Carrie, and Grace might have lived in.

Sunday we arrived at the Canadian Rockies and camped at Waterton Lakes.   

-Juliet

Lake Superior to Kenora, Ontario

Wednesday we drove across most of the rest of Ontario to Sleeping Giant National Park.  Eric took Kai out for an early morning walk along Mary Louise Lake.  They came across a small herd of deer and then flushed a bald eagle out of a tree near the shore.  Later, when I went for a run, I flushed the same eagle off its perch on a tree next to the beach, and it flew off in disgust.    

On our way out of the Park we drove out to Thunder Bay Lookout.  Some park administrator dude approved the construction of a lookout point ten feet out from the edge of the cliff overhanging Thunder Bay.  Hapless tourists like ourselves walk out to the end and find themselves standing on spaced slats of thin steel an eternity above the water.  Here are Liam and Kai, clinging to the railing and each other and baring their teeth, driven to the very edge by their parents' desire for a photo as their parents wave and smile from the safety of solid ground.   

      

Notice that the dog is absent from the photo - he took one look down and beat a hasty retreat.  

These give a sense of the view. Poor doomed tree.

The moose is very important to Canada’s tourist industry and the Canadians are very protective of the moose here.  Along most of the roadways outside of the cities are signs asking drivers to watch for the moose.  There are pictures of the moose in various poses – standing, smirking, charging.  You’d think these signs were geared toward safety, toward warning people that they might crash into a moose inconveniently located in their lane.  But we’ve been in Canada long enough now to discern the real reason for these signs.  Aside from the Moose in the back of our car, we have seen neither hide nor hair of the Canadian moose.  I’m beginning to suspect they’ve lost it, and they’ve put up these signs in the hope that someone will find it.  That’s what we would do if we lost ours. 

Speaking of road signs, there are lots, providing tons of useful information.  Some provide information you might not have been aware of, like the name of each one of the thousands of lakes we’ve driven by (they’re starting to repeat themselves – Dogtooth Lake #3, Link Lake #2, Blue Lake #4514.  The GPS, in a fit of electronic pique, has taken to identifying them as “Lake”).  Some signs provide information you might already have.  My favorite of those: “Large Vehicles Need More Room.”  Ah.  So they do.  Thanks very much.   

Thursday …. camping in Lake Blue Provincial Park, near Kenora, Ontario.

Lake Huron to Lake Superior

I thought Lake Huron was a great lake.  And it is.  But Lake Superior was even greater.  We camped in Lake Superior Provincial Park in a site within a stone’s throw of the Lake (a stone thrown by a professional baseball pitcher, but still…this was our view:

After Eric and the kids went to sleep I worked on the chapter I’m writing by firelight with the stars shining through a skylight of fir tops. 

In the morning the kids built tiny kingdoms with the multicolored pebbles on the lakeshore.

 I went for a swim.  Was that ever great.  The water is so clear and the waves so regular and gentle that you can see straight through to the bottom even quite far out (which is lovely and terrifying at the same time – would you rather see Jaws coming from a mile away or swim in blissful murk until that last toothy moment?).  I swam along the shoreline so I could watch the kids.  When I turned back I found a highway of bubbles from my first pass.  I swam back and forth for a while weaving a trellis of bubbles on the lake’s surface.  Going down under for a closer look at the undulations of sand I found my shadow miming my strokes on the bottom of the lake.  I could hear the bubbles effervescing from my hair.  I’ve never felt more like a mermaid.  Or a can of Coke.

Kai and I lay down on the warm pebbles to dry off and warm up and watch Liam at work on the castles.  When we left, I turned to look back at the lake and the bubbles were there still, shining in the sunlight beyond the stone kingdom.

-Juliet

Guelph to Manitoulin Island

From our campground at the Guelph Conservation Area (in case anyone is trying to correct their spouse’s pronunciation of Guelph, it’s “Gwelf.”  Since Canada is bilingual, I feel compelled to add that in French it would be pronounced “Ghwhelf.”  That’s why the French don’t name their towns “Guelph.”  I also feel compelled to add that there would be more marital harmony in the world if everyone else would kindly refrain from naming things “Guelph”) we drove to the Bruce Peninsula National Park campground. 

I offered to take the kids to the beach at the campground lake while Eric got to go food shopping.  Liam and Kai found very tiny fish, snails making snail trails on the bottom of the lake, and a blue heron ankle-deep in the water that edged away from us down the shore.    

The next morning we hiked down to the beach at the Grotto on Lake Huron.  Holding a towel so that Liam could change into his bathing suit, I took a close look at the rocks that girdled our changing place, poked out like old bones, whitish-grey and knobby, eaten through at the knuckles.  The water at the Grotto reminded me of that moment in the Wizard of Oz when they turn on the Technicolor and you realize you’ve been swimming in black and white all your life.  It’s also like swimming in a mild electric current – when you get out you realize how cold the water is because your skin is humming.  Here’s what it looks like:

We climbed around the top of a rocky path and bouldered down to the grotto itself.  It’s the open mouth of a cave, filled with water and green light from an underwater passageway to Lake Huron.  People jump into it from a ledge at the back and you can see their bodies in silhouette greenly backlit from the underwater window.  Some people try to swim through the passageway to the open water beyond.  Well-mannered people don’t do that when their mothers are nearby, so that their mothers don’t have to kill them first to save their mothers the agony of watching them try.

We booked it* to Tobermory to catch the Chicheemaun ferry for a two hour trip from the tip of the Bruce Peninsula across a chunk of Lake Huron to Manitoulin Island.  The ferry is amazing.  When it approaches the dock all you can see from the parking lot is the top of the massive ship looming over a nearby hill.  The nose (people who know boats would call it the prow) opens like the beak of a huge turtle.  Tourists line up with cameras on either side of the dock to stare and photograph your last moments as you drive in.  You drive up the tongue, enter the beak poised yawning above you, and pass through the ferry’s throat into its maw.  Then they tell you to leave your car, climb to an upper deck and stay there so that it can digest your car.  I guess that’s how they get up enough energy to make the crossing.      

We spent Monday night on Manitoulin Island in a campground that advertised itself as having a great swimming area.  Which we didn’t use.  Because of the playground, laundry, apple tree, and wifi. 

On to Lake Superior.

-Juliet

Canastota, NY to Guelph, Ontario

We visited Niagara Falls on Saturday.  Saturdays in August are (apparently) when everyone who isn't already married heads for Niagara Falls to tie the knot and link their eternal commitment to a stunning, flowing, misty waterscape, much like those special someones in times past who tied their destinies to a wooden barrel to ride the plunging tons of icy water over a cliff to the unforgiving rocky pools below.  Ok, maybe not so much like that.  Anyway, it was very evocative.  If it weren't too late, I would have proposed to Eric. 

Liam and Kai watched the water for a long time.  The Falls are stunning, but visiting them stirred a vague dissatisfaction that they finally clarified for me.  We first saw the Falls from Prospect Point, where they asked whether we could go up and look from the Observation tower above us.  At Horseshoe Falls, Kai looked down and saw the boardwalk for the Cave of the Clouds below, and asked if we could go down there.  Standing at the bottom looking up, I’m sure, they would ask if there was any way to climb up.  The waterfall is so elemental, with unimaginable volumes of water hurling over and through an unreal height and shattering itself into mist and roar, that there really is no way to hold the fullness of its sound and fury all at once in your mind.  All the kids – and I - can do is try to knit together the snippets we collect of rush and drop and sound and vapor.  I feel like I am peeking through the keyhole of a vast room, with no way to reach up and open the door.  

Kai was a bit overwhelmed by it all.

We crossed the border into Ontario and had dinner in Guelph at the fittingly-named Happy Traveler Café and Bistro where, to my happiness, the band played Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here.

-Juliet