Day 82 July 27, 2011 Middle of Nowhere to Middle of Lake Superior Provincial Park 51km

I hit the snooze button for over an hour and a half this morning. That’s what kind of a day it was going to be.

It was a cool morning, which was a nice change. I felt more tired than usual today which was a bit of bummer seeing as it was super hilly all day. But again the scenery was astonishing as I entered Lake Superior Provincial Park.

I ran over Montreal River and we took some photos looking over the bridge as it plunged down to the riverbed. I’m not the biggest fan of heights and felt a little uncomfortable looking over the edge.

Around km 37, as I was slowly trudging up one of the endless climbs a silver VW Golf pulled over in front of me and out jumped Heather Levie, an old friend of mine. She and her boyfriend Travis were camping in the park and just happened to drive past me on their way to Orphan Lake. It was great to see her again! We tried to get Mike’s attention as he was only about 500m back in the RV, but he was busy making sandwiches and missed the whole thing.

While it’s annoying that Mike has no phone service and we have no Internet service, it is kind of amusing as the entire time we were in the Atlantic Provinces, Mike had great reception and I had almost none.

I continued on for another km or so and pulled up to a big scenic lookout where we stopped and had lunch. I probably should have kept walking instead of stopping to eat because after lunch I felt stiff and exhausted and was only at 39km. I had hoped to try and again make it to 60km but it was struggle just to get to 50km.

We went for a quick swim in Katherine’s Cove, a huge beach with clear cool water next to where I stopped. There were signs forbidding the likes of our MCC from spending the night so we drove around looking for a place to stay. We happened upon the pullout for Orphan Lake, and while we decided not to stay there, we did find Heather and Travis’ car, upon which I placed my card with the Steps to Action.

While driving around looking for a place to stay we came upon the sign below. I’m at a loss to describe what one of the pictures mean.

We decided to drive back to our lunch spot, the scenic lookout and try our luck spending the night there. We had purchased an overnight ticket at Orphan Lake although we weren’t sure the lookout counted as a place to park overnight. With no signs though we gave it a shot and the good news is, it wouldn’t be easy to try and tow the MCC!

So we had dinner overlooking Lake Superior. Beautiful.