Sudbury Saturday Night and Wawa
Based on our experience from last year, we have planned our stops this year so that we only drive on the weekends. Our first stop, for one night, was Sudbury (cue Stompin’ Tom’s “Sudbury Saturday Night”). It was one of the longest drives we have planned, as it was a good 6.5hrs from the cottage.
The first lesson for this trip was that the “distance to empty” on the fuel gauge, takes a bit of time to recalibrate for the fact that you are pulling a trailer. So, we might have coasted into the gas station in Chalk River with 3km “left” of gas in the truck.
The campground we stayed at in Sudbury (the Holiday Beach Campground) had just opened for the season, and their water wasn’t working, but not a big deal for us since we were just there for a night. After unhitching we checked out a few of the places Adam had lived in while growing up in Sudbury, then went for a wander to downtown. We had to see the Sudbury arena, the home of the Sudbury Wolves hockey team, and had a bite to eat at one of our favourite Sudbury restaurants “The Laughing Buddha”
The next morning we hit the road for a 5.5hr drive to Wawa. Last year we had stayed close to Wawa at Rabbit Blanket Campground in the Lake Superior Provincial Park (which we wrote about last year). This year we stayed closer to Wawa, at the Wawa RV Resort and Campground, so we were within walking distance of the town. Being so early in the season, there were not a lot of other campers. As seems to be a bit of a theme for this trip so far, the campground was without water one of the days as they were doing some construction near the laundry facilities and pool, but we had a great site:
And I appreciated the various hand-painted signs throughout the campground facilities.
There were walking trails from the campground, and one afternoon after stopping to watch a Trumpeter Swan flying past, we heard a great splashing in the river next to the trail, so we rushed over to the edge of the embankment and were amazed to see two moose galloping through the water.
Another day, we drove to the beautiful Magpie Scenic High Falls and did the trail walk that was there.
Thanks to the panels in the interpretive center at the falls, we were surprised to read that Glenn Gould visited Wawa quite frequently. Less surprising were the facts that he drove there alone, always stayed in the same room at the same hotel (Room 102 at the Wawa Motor Inn), and drew very little attention from the locals, which could be one of the reasons he frequented there?
Another walk that we did was along the Michipicoten River. It felt like walking through a Group of Seven painting.
One of the things that will stay with me was from our drive to Sandy Beach. Intermittently along the drive, as we would turn a corner, or look up on a rock face next to the road, and there would be a red dress hanging in a tree.
For those of you not familiar, hanging a red dress outside is in reference to the REDress Project, which was a public art installation that was created in response to the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the United States. It was quite appropriately haunting to see them along the road.
As for Wawa itself, there are not a lot of businesses left downtown, with the busiest places being the Tim Hortons (which is on the outskirts of town), Young’s General Store (again on the outskirts of town), the Canadian Tire which is downtown and has the billboard motto of “Bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside”, and the Valu-Mart grocery store. To close this post, I do have an unanswered question about the Yogourt sign in the Valu-Mart in Wawa.
