Danger: Band Crossing (Day 13)

I'm drinking an old mill right now

           The Argyles woke tired and sweaty that morning. The sun had heated up the tent like set lights. We had to wake up at a decent hour for a busy day ahead of us: in addition to getting the window fixed, we had also planned to drive to Wawa, which was seven hours away. We prepared our first meal on the campstove, a combination of fatty beans, eggs, and bread washed down with instant coffee. With food in our belly and caffeine in our veins, moral was high. 

Assembling our camp stove for the first time

But this resolve was tested: our first trial was navigating to the correct glass repair store. Sudbury suffers from a lack of urban planning and thus find one’s way around can be difficult. With Matt Dowling driving and GD navigating, tensions got high. And the Dowlings aren’t afraid of speaking their minds to one another. 

Happy to be at the right Speedy!

After going to three other 3 speedy repair stores—the man at the Canadian tire had given us the address of one, the name of another, and the phone number of a third—we finally found it. A francophone man named Charlie made small talk with us as we waited. With the window repaired and spirits high once again, Matt Dowling began backing the van out of a narrow opening. Just as he seemed be almost out, he starting turning the van the wrong way. I started smacking the back of the van to alert him, and fortunately he stopped, just inches away from smashing the left side of the van on a concrete poll. 

But we were not free to depart just yet. The breaks had been giving us trouble and Speedy Auto repair, one of the places we went to mistakenly, would check them for a dollar. After that came more bad news: the breaks needed to be replaced. We spent the afternoon in the reception at the mechanics. I hadn’t expected tour life to be glamorous, but eating sandwiches made with warm cheese—it had been sitting in the van for two days—prepared on the floor of the mechanic’s was a new level of grime I didn’t think possible. 

The white whale getting a tune-up

I told Matt to hurry before we lost the view of Lake Superior. Little did I know...

 But a few hours later, the van was fixed and we were finally ready to hit the road. The repairs had taken all afternoon so instead of going onto Wawa, we settled on a campsite an hour closer. It was a five hour drive on the transcanada, this little stretch of civilization surrounded by wilderness. I was beginning to get a sense of how isolated Northern Ontario really was.

We arrived at the campsite at sunset. It was renowned for its beauty, possessing a sandy beach on the shores of the Lake Superior. We pulled up to a secluded campsite and began to set up. It was so peaceful to be in the wilderness . Then came the roar of a large engine. Our campsite was located right next to the highway. So much for communing with nature. But when we sat out under the stars, a feeling of tranquility that one can only get beneath the Milky Way came over me. This next leg of the journey might be able to top the first. 

The Argyles contemplate the meaning of life