Quebec, Ontario, Quebec, Ontario …

First, a few NL photos I found on the cutting room floor …

As it turns out, the caribou count was higher than our moose count while in Newfoundland.  These little guys were spotted along the edge of the road, I believe within Gros Morne National Park.  They were so small, that at first I thought they were antelope, though this is clearly not antelope country.  They are certainly a lot smaller than the woodland caribou I am familiar with in northern Alberta and Jasper National Park.  They were totally unconcerned about the few cars that were stopped to look or the ones that roared by at highway speed.

From Edmundston, NB, we headed into Quebec.  We had not heard back from a friend we had hoped to visit in Quebec City, so more or less blasted across this section Quebec, back into Ontario just outside of Ottawa.  Traffic was a bit thick in Montreal as we passed through the center this time, pretty close to rush hour, but there were no major tie-ups, and the gps led us out the far side.

We did meet up with a friend in Ottawa for a bite and a drink in the evening, then in the morning headed back into Quebec on a northern route through the Gatineau hills, Val D’Or, and eventually back into Ontario again near Kirkland lake. 

In one area in northern Quebec there were some unique roadside mailbox configurations.  For a few miles, almost every mailbox was mounted on a long horizontal pole or pipe with a counter weight at the other end, that lifted the box 6-8 feet in the air.  Hanging down below the mailbox was a piece or rope or cord used to pull the box down to where it could be checked.  Unfortunately, there were no more of them before I decided it needed a photo.

In Kirkland Lake we met fellow RV bloggers Wilf & Elizabeth, and Hailey got to meet Morris, a good looking young cat.  Hisses were exchanged, of course, rigs were compared, then it was off to Timmins to meet Shania Twain!

She was apparently not in town ;-(, so we had to settle for an oil change for the big diesel.  I didn’t think that was a fair trade at all.

Not sure what was going on, or if it was just a coincidence, but in one short span of about an hour, we spotted 3 different helicopters being transported on trailers.  This one pulled off the highway, so we were able to photograph it.

Another strange encounter happened on the road  north of Wa Wa, Ontario.  We met two cars in a row with cameras mounted on a post about 4 feet above the roof.  They were almost identical to the Google Earth streetview camera cars I had seen passing through Lake Louise a few years back.

 (If you go to 51.425157  -116.179444 on streetview, you can see me walking across the street in front of the car, then trying to take a photo as it drove away.  Some of our ‘work’ trucks are also in the image)

 But these cars had Tom Tom logos (a GPS company) on them, so I don’t know what they were up to?  A bit of online research showed that there had been similar sightings of these cars in Europe, but this was the first indication I saw that they were also in north America, but no one seems to know ‘what’ they are doing exactly, or why?

The leaves were just starting to turn colour in eastern Ontario, but the colour picked up a bit as we moved west.

For a change of route we decided on a southerly pass taking us past Rainy Lake and Fort Frances, before having to move back up to the Trans-Canada highway at Kenora.

There is a large pulp mill in Ft Frances, and it seems that all the wood is transported in 8’ lengths stacked crossways on the trucks, unlike most logging trucks in the west that carry much longer logs lengthwise down the truck.

 

Perhaps because of this, there are regular ‘pulp truck’ check stations and these strange arrangements of large round devices.  It looks like a truck drives between the two barrels to align the load and push any protruding logs back into place?

And finally, for this post, one more sign shot.