500 mile drive across canada

Quebec City to North Bay

Friday August 19 2016

The campground we have been staying at, camping Transit has a do it yourself RV washing station. This morning on our way out, we washed our motorhome. Like the jeep, it too was caked with a coating of grey construction dirt. We still have a lot of cleaning to do in all the crevices, but it's clean on the outside.

Approaching Montreal

We had planned on bypassing Montreal and our plans didn't change as we neared the large city. I'm sure there may be many nice things to see in Montreal but if we had any thoughts of stopping they evaporated when we got to the gridlocked traffic. There is a massive construction project underway on the freeway system and maneuvering into or out of the city was a confused snarled mess.

FYI, ouest is west and est is east in French

Next stop was the nations capital of Ottawa. I think I had a mental image of it as small and quaint. When we got to the outer approaches we could see it was another huge city. Using the analogy that it would be just another big city and could never compare to Quebec we made a snap decision to ride on by. We may have been totally wrong about Ottawa, but we're not big city fans. I'll have to research it and maybe we'll get back someday.

Back in English speaking Canada, but it's all pretty mixed up out here

We stopped about 80 miles down the road in the town of Pembroke, planning on spending the night in the Walmart parking lot. After a brief rest, it was still only about 4:30 and I decided rather than sit here all afternoon we could easily make it to the town of North Bay. There would be another Walmart and we would arrive around before dark.

Overnighting at Walmart in North Bay Ontario

When we arrived at the North Bay Walmart there were already about 12-14 RV's in the parking lot. We picked a spot, off to the side but still in the front of the store. I'm always thinking about security, even here in Canada. Tomorrow, we have a reasonable distance of about 250 miles to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.