Many miles through Manitoba and into Ontario
This measures East to West. In practice it’s about 50 miles east of Winnipeg in the middle of farming country, mainly of hay and dairy cattle, logging and plywood factories.
On the map, Canada doesn’t look quite as big as it is. Maybe we minimized distance in our planning for this long trip? “Long” indeed. The highway goes on and on. And on, for 5 days total. This is the Canadian Shield, a land scraped by glaciers that has hardly recovered in 10,000 years. Thin soil, cut-over forests, tremendous water held in thousands of ponds, lakes, creeks, rivers, marshes, and swamps. Beautiful in its way.
You get to see it in detail since the speed limit is 60 all the way (unless it’s less in settled areas). We tried to figure out the *actual* speed limit, and it turns out to be 65, according to filling station workers. Local people were forever tail-gating us and then passing in a burst of speed as we drove 63 and 64, but I figured they get a break, being local. Julianne drove faster. However, I got into slow driving, and enjoyed the relaxation of looking and looking.
A road cut in Manitoba, showing rock a few billion years old.
The Canadian Shield. I can't seem to absorb the age of these rocks: over 4 billion years. That is, very roughly, only 300 mya after the formation of the earth itself. 4,300,000,000 years old. More or less, according to Wikipedia and various websites, not all agreeing on the age or development of the Shield. These rocks are the mantle of the earth still on the surface. We can walk on them, they've been scraped clean by glaciers and are covered in lakes large and small. There are mines, dams and hydropower, fishing and hiking, logging.
Lake Superior in the background… there’s a string of barrier islands all along, so it’s hard to get an open shot from the Canada side. Notice how red the water is, common in this whole area. This is Aquasabon Falls.
