A mix of weather to Kenora

We could start getting used to the weather we had this morning.

We were surrounded by blue sky and a hot sun, but the air was cool. Once again, we had a west wind pushing us along; it's just too bad they weren't more frequent across the Prairies.

Over the last day and a half, the scenery has completely changed as we move into the Canadian Shield. There are trees all around, lakes, and grey rock faces lining the Transcanada as it slowly winds around the easy-rolling hills into Ontario. All of us passed the 3000km mark today.

Our first stop was scenic Falcon Lake near the provincial border. It is beautiful cottage country, and we took a longer-than-usual lunch to enjoy the weather and some ice cream from a local shop. Many people stopped to talk to us, and one man even heard one of yesterday's radio interviews.

Unfortunately, as typical East weather goes, the sunshine quickly faded into rain just as we were leaving. We seemed to get out of it for a while, but after we crossed the border into Ontario and got closer to Kenora, it just got worse, escalating to a full-out rainstorm. It might rain often in Pat's home province of British Columbia, especially in Vancouver, but the rain is misty at best most of the time. In Ontario and Quebec, the home provinces of us other four, when it rains it pours, and the skies just opened up on us we passed Lake of the Woods along the highway. Mike, Jon, Brian, and I loved it, no matter how hard it came down, but naturally it didn't last very long. It eventually it turned into sunshine, and back to rain once more, before clearing up again for the evening. Classic lake weather.

After our 120km day to Kenora, we are now set up in Brian's stepsister Heather's house along the Winnipeg River. Her husband Tony works for the Ontario Provincial Police, and they have two young children, Tyler and Emma, 15 months and 3 years old, respectively. Once they got over their initial shyness at having 4 strangers in the house, it was fun watching them compete for our attention. Even though he can't speak, Tyler understands what the garbage is, and his 'trick' was to take ours and put it in there. Emma did a song and dance, and there was defintely some competition between them.

Tomorrow we'll take a day off, taking care of some errands during the day, and watching some movies at night, trying to do as little as possible to rest up as much as we can before we continue on through Northern Ontario.
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