GO! Girls Outdoors

And so the Great Morgan Tour of Canada continues!  From Thunder Bay and Lakehead University I caught a bus through freezing rain to Sioux Lookout, home of Uncle Jon and his family.  For those people who don’t know what freezing rain is (which used to be me, until my bus trip), it’s when rain falls through air that’s relatively warm (0°C or a little more) and hits things that are relatively cold (less than 0°C).  The things that are relatively cold are trees, the road, pieces of the car, the road signs, etc - and when the rain hits these cold things it freezes, forming beautiful hanging icicles, thick coats of ice around objects or treacherous sheets of ice on the roads.  They’d been calling for freezing rain on the weather station (they have a whole TV station for weather over here, it’s pretty awesome) but I was a bit confused about what it was - surely freezing rain is just wettish snow or hail, right?  However, as we drove along the road and I noticed that the van’s radio antenna was covered in a very thick coat of ice, and observed the icicles hanging off the highway signs, and saw the other cars on the road coated in ice, and was glad I wasn’t driving due to the coating of ice on the road - after seeing all these things, the penny finally dropped and I had one of those epiphany moments.  Aha!  This must be freezing rain!  Kind of like when I realised the word I read in books as ‘loo-tenant’ was the same word as people pronounced ‘leff-tenant’, or when I realised the tracks made for cross country skiing weren’t made by a very, very good cross country skier but by a special grooming machine.

Anyway, it turned out that by not buying a plane ticket but going the cheapo way (by bus) paid off because all the flights out of Thunder Bay were cancelled that day due to the freezing rain.  While I was waiting to be picked up from the bus stop in an establishment called the ‘5th Avenue’ (Nightly Dancing and Entertainment) I met a lot of people  who were stranded in Sioux Lookout by the freezing rain and the lack of flights that day.  There had been a big hockey tournament (ice hockey, that is) in Sioux Lookout on the weekend and there were a lot of people hanging out in the 5th Avenue because they couldn’t get back to their communities.  Apparently a truck got stuck in some slush on the ice road so it was impassable, and no flights were going out.

The whole reason I was sitting in the 5th Avenue (Nightly Dancing and Entertainment) was because I hadn’t managed to contact my uncle to tell him what time the bus was getting in.  I’d left a message with a time but this turned out to be wrong, then I left another message leaving the wrong name for the restaurant where I was waiting.  It’s amazing I get anywhere, really.  And although I’ve been to Sioux Lookout several times and knew exactly what my uncle’s house looked like, I had absolutely no idea how to get there - except that it was possibly on Fanning Avenue because when we went there on a family visit in 1990, Jon made everyone bright red sweatshirts that said ‘Fanning Avenue Fun Club - Sioux Lookout Christmas 1990’ and my dad used to wear his all the time when I was a kid.

When I described my predicament to one of the people I met in the 5th Avenue, she looked at me as if I was a bit slow.  My uncle Jon has been a doctor in Sioux Lookout for about the past 25 years or so, and according to my research, which was seeing the Welcome to Sioux Lookout (Population 5,200) sign on the way in, the town only has a population of 5,200 people.  My new friend patiently explained to me that pretty much every person in the room would know where Doctor Jon lived, and so would the taxi drivers, the people in the shops and the people on the streets.  I could have asked any kid on the street and they would probably know my cousins.  In fact, (she explained) I could probably walk up to someone in the street and ask for a lift to Doctor Jon’s house and be taken right to the door.