Today was a much, much better day than yesterday. Overnight, I received email from Vinny, the guy who I bought the H1 from. He had a tip on where to look for the heater problem, and with that help I was able to get the auxiliary heater going. The aux heater is basically a second heater core and blower between the front and back seats. And, all by itself, it is plenty capable of making the cabin very toasty in short order. Which is very nice if, say, you’re looking at driving a couple of hundred miles in the snow and the main heater is flat out refusing to work.
With a functional heater, a full tank of gas, a good night’s sleep, and a couple of fun audiobooks (the end of Making Money, the beginning of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar), the drive from Chapleau to Thunder Bay was easy and relaxing. The first couple of hours, there was decent snow on the side of the road, and the gradual transition to lake country was really pretty to watch. Driving the H1 is starting to feel normal, and I’m getting used to parking the thing.
Highlights along the way included a closed ski slope at Marathon (the road goes by the top of the slope, and there’s a lift to get you back up), and a giant goose apparently serving to promote… I’m not sure what. I only noticed the goose. There was also the brief time when the speedometer just stopped working, but I’m going to pretend that that didn’t happen. It did fix itself, after all, which really is the same thing as not-happening in the cosmic sense.
I arrived in the so-far-misnamed Thunder Bay around 5pm. Misnamed because there has been a total lack of thunder so far. There is, however, a bay. And a very, very big bay it is. Lake Superior is pretty darned gigantic; from the shore here, it looks like an ocean. Minus the waves, of course. Someone should really come up with an adjective to indicate that these central North American lakes are not at all your run-of-the-mill oversized ponds.
Unfortunately for the aesthete, Thunder Bay is a working port town, so most of the waterfront is taken up by the port, railroads, warehouses, and so on. My hotel room is on the 4th floor and has a great view; from street level, though, there’s not much to be seen.
