Northwestern Ontario

2011/08/20

Drove from Dryden to thunder Bay today.  If you look up the distance it doesn’t seem like much, but the speed limit in northern Ontario is 90 km/h and this stretch is rather monotonous, so it felt longer than the roughly 4.5 hours of driving it actually was.  I was a bit tired by the time I arrived, and glad I was able to get a room at the first place I checked.

My cell phone hasn’t been working since I entered Ontario, and I finally figured out why – I’m outside Virgin’s coverage area, and probably won’t be back inside until Sault Ste Marie or Sudbury.

I do rather like the landscape in this region – especially around Kenora.  It has lots of trees, both evergreen and coniferous, rocky outcroppings and small lakes with rocky islands in them.  Somewhat stark areas too, with scrawny and half-drowned trees.

d20110820_0037

Also lots of areas that look like meadows but are actually bogs – lakes being filled in by decaying biomass.

d20110820_0002

I realized today why I like this area – it’s a lot like B.C., except without the mountains.  None of the scenery here would look out of place in the rockies.

Just before getting to Thunder Bay, I stopped to rephotograph Kakabeka Falls. Don’t worry, my father already took care of the obvious jokes about the name.

From a late 1980s trip, late in a winter afternoon:

f1n8

Today:

d20110820_0078

I was also going to rephotograph the crappy motel we ended up staying in 1992 when we were moving from Toronto back to the farm:

f32n20a

But there was some kind of festival going on today and the area was crammed with people.

I have to admit that since Brandon I’ve been feeling a bit road-weary.  I love driving but not this much.  But, starting tomorrow I’ll be seeing the Great Lakes again, and that’s exciting, and in about three days I’ll be in Toronto and hopefully able to take public transit for most things for a few days, and have a bit of a rest.

[gmap type=”satellite” visible=”true” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110820.kml” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]

Onward to Ontario

2011/08/19

Stopped off at the Mint in Winnipeg and took the tour – I had done this once as a kid but couldn’t remember anything about it.  It was moderately interesting.  I didn’t know that this mint produces only circulation coins (including coins for many countries other than Canada) and the one in Ottawa produces the fancier commemorative type coins.  Also didn’t know what the core material of our coins is these days – for most, it’s steel, including pennies.  Pennies are steel with a microns-thick copper coating.  Cheaper than solid copper.  Even so, about half the pennies made disappear from circulation.

They have this nice display out front of the flags of the countries they do business with:

d20110819_0007

I bought a nice coin set from the gift shop for my collection.

Then, onward.

Final impressions of Winnipeg:  It has nice parks, some nice old buildings and is nicely treed, and has a great dessert place.  It has a weirdly high concentration of Tim Hortons franchises and also a high number of small burger joints.  Other than that, it’s about as attractive as a cinder block.  I do not want to live here.

Drove to Dryden today – not a long haul.  Northern Ontario has weird town spacing, if like me you prefer to stay at upscale sleep establishments.  I could do it in ~700km hops or in ~400km hops.  I prefer the latter, since it gives me time to stop and see the sights along the way, so the next few days will be short drives.  And then I’ll be in Toronto for several days.

Dryden is a sad place.  Its skyline consists of one thing: an enormous pulp mill.  Nothing else is more than tree height.  It has a road, a railway, a tiny commercial section and that’s about it.

I have a bad history with this town too.  I’ve been through northern Ontario four times before – twice by rail and twice by road.  One of those road occasions, weather was poor and hotels were more full than usual, and we had a really hard time finding a place to stay.  It was late at night when we finally found a room here in Dryden, and it was crappy.  Not a good night.  We did take in a movie at a nice old theater they have downtown – with original wooden seating and all.  It’s still there, but it wasn’t open today.  I went to the town’s faux Chinoise restaurant for supper and had Combo #5 – sweet & sour chicken balls, rice and steamed veggies.  The chicken balls were good, the rest not so much.

I passed the longitudinal center of Canada today – it’s about an hour east of Winnipeg.  My west-to-east trip isn’t quite at the halfway point though, since I’ll be detouring down to Niagara falls and will also be spending multiple nights in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.

[gmap type=”satellite” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110819.kml” visible=”true” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]

Winnipeg

2011/08/18

Spent a full day in Winnipeg today, partly for memory rehashing and partly for new-stuff tourism.

I don’t have very many memories of Winnipeg, actually. I’ve been through a number of times and we lived here for a month or so one winter when my father was trying to find work.  It was not a terribly happy time.

First order of the day was to try and relocate the happy places, so I went for a walk downtown.  Tried a burger from VJ’s – unique flavor but overall I didn’t like it.  Then spotted some kind of wall-crawling contest going on near the corner of Portage and Main:

d20110818_0023

There were two obviously inexperienced people rappelling down the face of this building while an announcer across the street egged them on.  Not sure what that was all about, but at least someone found a use for the Mountain Equipment Co-Op store that mysteriously exists here.

The first location I was looking for was the former storefront of Doug Sulipa’s Comic World.  I mentioned in a previous post that while we lived on the farm I discovered and got addicted to The New Mutants comic series, while it was still in its late teen issue numbers.  Comic World had a huge storefront on Portage Avenue at the time – if I remember right he claimed to have 100,000 back-issues in the store, and I believe it.  Comic nerd heaven!  Thanks to Doug, I back-filled every missing issue.  Even better, he had arcade games in the store.  The only one I remember playing was Argus, which I still really like for its music.  If I ever collect the musician powerup I’ve always wanted, Argus and Black Tiger will be tied for the first video games I remix the music of.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the old storefront is gone, now replaced by part of this new mall:

d20110818_0044

And right across the street, this fancy new building:

d20110818_0062-0063_pano

stands where I believe the other notable location was: Mother’s Arcade.  I always thought of Mother’s as the most famous and professional arcade in Canada, probably because it’s the only Canadian arcade I ever read a magazine review of (I have since gone through all my old video game magazines trying to find that review, with no luck).

I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time in Mother’s, but it was a nice place.  The front was all fancy stonework with columns and looked like it had once been a bank.  Inside was nicely decorated in sleek futuristic lines like you’d expect from an arcade.  The game selection wasn’t really to my taste though – they had Dragon’s Lair, which was debuting to much fanfare at the time.  They even had a secondary screen on top of the cabinet so a larger crowd could watch.  I played it once and decided it was little more than an interactive slideshow, and thus not really a game.  They also had some uncommon games like Bubbles and Joust 2, but I mostly ended up playing Xevious.

There was another arcade not far away, off the wrong (ie north) side of Portage, but I can’t recall where it was.  My mother was nervous about leaving me there, but they had a better game selection.  There was a vertical-scrolling helicopter game that I no longer remember the name of, but played because it had an enormous screen.  But the real star of that arcade was Altered Beast, which I couldn’t get enough of to the point of making my mother angry by staying in there past the appointed hour.  It had such good graphics! And sampled voices!

 

Next destination was the Western Canadian Aviation Museum, which I’ve never been to before.  It was somewhat interesting and I took a lot of photos which will mostly have to be sorted out some other time.  It is a little cramped though – they need more space to properly display their collection.  The biggest surprise was seeing an Avrocar there – also known as the Flying Pancake, though due to budget overrun it never flew more than a meter off the ground:

d20110818_0517

 

I then went on to Bird’s Hill Park, which I’ve only visited a few times before but had fond memories of.  It has a network of paved bicycle paths going through a variety of fields and forests, like this:

d20110818_0520

If you’re a kid on a bike, this is a really neat place to camp.  There’s also a shallow lake with a wide beach that is great for wading and building sand castles.  The park is also home to an annual music festival, though I don’t remember if we ever attended that.

One of my most notable nightmares is associated with this place too.  When I was a kid I watched all sorts of science fiction television series, including Space: 1999.  One episode though, titled Dragon’s Domain, scared the snot out of me. Here was a large, man-eating tentacular horror with a single giant eyeball with a glowing brain behind it, and it could appear at will in any open doorway with almost no warning.  Anyway, somehow that monster got associated with this park and for two years I had a recurring nightmare that I was fleeing several of these creatures in a (non-extant) convenience store located in this park.  I got so used to the dream recurring that I eventually dreamed myself up an axe and fought back against the monsters, and the nightmares stopped.

 

Back to the present. After noodling around the park a bit it was supper time, so I went back into town and had a burger at Baked Expectations.  It was good, but not outstanding as burgers go.  But I did get another dessert, this time the carrot cake:

d20110818_0523

It was very good as carrot cakes go, but I liked last night’s chocolate cake better.

Returned to my room to offload the day’s pictures, and was pleasantly surprised by an intense lightning storm.  I managed to get a few exposures from my window:

d20110818_0546-0548_composite

[gmap type=”satellite” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110818.kml” visible=”true” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]

Brandon to Winnipeg

2011/08/17

Not a terribly eventful day; just a short drive to Winnipeg, where I plan to spend two nights as there are some museum type things I want to do there.

Some of the farmers in this area grow sunflowers:

d20110817_0002

I took a detour to check out the Spirit Sands desert in Spruce Woods park, but sadly the access road had been washed out – apparently the Assiniboine river flooded rather badly this year.  I did get to check out another, non-sandy hiking area nearby though. Weird landscape:

d20110817_0051

Just grass, sage and trees – almost no mid-size shrubberies.

I like this area.  When we were shopping around for our farm, my mother and I looked at property near here.  I thought it was neat that it was basically just small trees growing out of sand, and there was sand everywhere.  Obviously we didn’t buy the place since it would have been impossible to grow anything there, but it was neat anyway.  I found the iron foot of an old claw-foot bathtub near a ruined house on that property, and it might still be in our shed on the farm to this day.

Continued on to Winnipeg, and made the mistake of driving downtown at rush hour. Aggravating.  Got a room for the night, then got a dessert from Baked Expectations at the recommendation of a co-worker – and boy was it good.  I will get more desserts there tomorrow, the next day and on my return trip.

[gmap type=”satellite” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110817.kml” visible=”true” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]

Russell to Brandon

2011/08/16

Concluded my business in Russell and Angusville this morning.  I dropped by the Russell nursing home to see if I could find Wanda.  She wasn’t there but I left my card for her.  Also: I really do not want to end up in one of those places! Horrible.

Rossburn

Brief stop in Rossburn to document the usual places.  Here’s main street:

d20110816_0003

This town is actually holding on better than I expected; only a couple fewer businesses in operation than last time I was here.

Most prairie towns have at least one faux Chinoise restaurant, as a result of the railway work and the forced resettlement of Japanese during the war.  This down has two.  We often ate at this one:

d20110816_0007

They had good sweet & sour chicken balls (I didn’t know chickens had balls!) and best of all, a game room.  Played lots of Donkey Kong Junior here.

The other place across the road:

d20110816_0006

I didn’t like the food or the game selection quite as much, but they had one real oddity: the Hercules pinball machine, which had oversized balls.

There was also a proper pool hall and arcade, in the foreground building here:

d20110816_0005

I don’t remember playing any notable games there though.

On one of the side streets was one of the town’s two grocery stores, which I think was called M&M.  I liked going there because they sold lots of interesting collectable cards and stickers; I bought a lot of Wacky Packages stickers plus some video game themed ones that would be good on Ebay today if I hadn’t actually, you know, stuck them.  Inside the now-ruined camper on the farm.  The Wacky Packages were a major inspiration for my parodical sense of humor.

d20110816_0008

Interestingly, the M&M storefront now bears a sign identifying it as an arcade.  I didn’t know about this change.  Sadly, it is in the past; I looked in the window and the store is empty.

Wasagaming

One of our favorite getaway destination when we lived in Manitoba was the town of Wasagaming, on Clear Lake in Riding Mountain National Park. There is a huge and excellent campground there which we used often.  It’s only about a 90-minute drive from the farm so it was pretty convenient.

I find Wasagaming a really relaxing place.  Most of the commercial buildings are log cabin style, and there are lots of nice big trees around – it feels more like a resort than a town.  There’s a nice beach with sand perfect for making castles (a favorite activity when I was young).

d20110816_0056

Beside the tennis courts they had these giant chess/checkers sets that were great fun for kids:

d20110816_0022

Sadly the chess pieces seem to be missing, and the boards are no longer in very good shape.  Down at the other end of the tennis courts was a playground that I really liked, and while there is still a playground there none of the original equipment remains.

d20110816_0067

The lobby of the theater had a Gauntlet machine in it for a while – I spent many hours and quarters in there playing co-op with other kids – co-op video games were a rare and novel thing back then.

Wasagaming is also where I had two of my most unpleasant dining experiences, which affected me for a long time.  Across the road from the theater was a restaurant/deli that is no longer there.  I got a ham sandwich that turned out to be spoiled, though it tasted fine.  In the middle of that night I suddenly sat bolt upright and painted the inside of the camper with it.

The second one was at this place, just around the corner:

d20110816_0070

I loved milk, chocolate or otherwise, when I was a kid.  But the glass of milk they served me here had a… thing… at the bottom.  I have no idea what it was.  It was a transparent, gelatinous blob of something.  Sort of like an egg white.  That didn’t belong there and I was grossed out.  I didn’t drink milk again for two years, and actually rarely ever drank it again at all.  Actually, I recently found a very similar blob in a carton of milk in Vancouver.  Didn’t disturb me quite as much since I only use milk for cooking now – there was no danger of drinking the thing – but it brought back the bad memory.

Another bad experience I had in Wasagaming concerned a comic book.  One camping trip I hadn’t brought anything to read with me, so I begged some money from my parents and went into one of the tourist shops to buy a comic.  Their selection was really weird though; everything they had either didn’t interest me or I already had.  So I took a chance on a title I had never seen before.  I don’t remember what it was, but it was awful; violent with graphic blood and gore.  I had never seen anything like that before and it really upset me.

Despite these bad experiences that really stand out in my mind, I still love this town and plan to stop here for a night on my return trip.

Just outside of town is this weird conglomerate establishment called Sportsman’s Park.

d20110816_0017

It’s a campground, ice cream & burger stand, amusement park, car wash, weekend flea market, arcade and who knows what else.  We actually attended the flea market a few times, and once I foolishly sold some of my books and comics for money.

Flea_Market

But the real highlight of this place was the arcade.  It was a really good arcade.  Lots of games.  The one I remember as most characteristic of this place was the underrated classic, Pengo.  But I also played a lot of Double Dragon and Street Fighter 1 & 2 here.

Surprisingly, the arcade is still here.  Sadly it’s about one quarter the size it used to be, and the game selection is pretty poor, but I dropped a quarter into Wonder Boy and actually did better than I ever have before.

After having a stroll around Wasagaming and enjoying an ice cream from the same store I did as a kid, I headed on down to

Brandon

Brandon is Manitoba’s second-largest city, and being just under two hours from the farm it was where we went for our semi-monthly big shopping and supply runs.  We always stayed overnight at the Colonial Inn, and I did the same this time.  They used to have games in the swimming pool area, and I played a lot of Klax there, but this time around there was nothing.

We also lived in Brandon for a while, in the winter of 1992-1993.  Having left Toronto due to the recession having cost both my parents their jobs, we ended up back at the farm but didn’t want to spend the winter there, and hoped my father could find work in Brandon.  So we rented this trailer in a trailer park at the south end of the city:

f37n09

It was miserable.  It was cold, my room was completely unfurnished and really ugly, and there was no money to spare – seldom even a quarter for a video game.

This being on our way back west after Toronto, I did have my ‘386 PC at this time, and I spent this winter and the follow couple of years writing programs in an attempt to make some money in the shareware marketplace.  One other good thing that happened here is that I discovered a local radio station that played some pretty decent techno at night – that helped get me through the horrible depression of that winter.

On today’s return visit, I can no longer find our tailer; the part of the court it was in has been overwritten by shopping and industrial businesses.  The trailer court itself, though, has grown and is actually pretty nice now, as trailer courts go – decent yards with fences and hedges and lots of large trees.

Just north of the trailer court is one of Brandon’s largest malls.  It’s even bigger now, but it is remarkable only in that it’s where we used to walk for groceries when we could afford them, and I occasionally got to play Trog and Aeroboto in front of the Safeway there. Trog was a good game even though it was basically just Pac-Man with humorous claymation.

And north of that mall – actually sandwiched between the mall and the Colonial Inn – was an arcade in the basement of this building (left of the McDonald’s):

d20110816_0072

It was a dark, smoky place and I never ventured to the back, but I did enjoy the unconventional soundtrack and gameplay of Mad Planets and also played lots of Mappy – still one of my favorite games from the era, both for its gameplay and its catchy music.

A few blocks further north, on the other side of the Colonial Inn, was yet another arcade.  I can no longer finds its location, but the best game they had there was Super Dodge Ball, which turned out to be surprisingly fun for a sports game.  I was attracted to it by its use of the Double Dragon character art style.

Continuing the arcade tour, at this still-extant but mostly empty mall downtown:

d20110816_0074

I played some Flicky and Pooyan in the mall, and there was also a chain arcade here called Long John Silver’s.  They had a couple other locations including Portage La Prairie.  I played a bunch of Street Fighter II there, plus a unique game I haven’t seen anywhere else: Blob. It must be pretty rare since the KLOV doesn’t know about it and I can’t find any screenshots in GIS. I quite enjoyed it though.

Oh yeah, and at a campground at the north end of the city they had Granny & the Gators and The Pit, which I played because it was weird but didn’t really approve of because the graphics were merely C64-quality – I suspected it wasn’t really an arcade game because of that.  Brandon was a great city for arcades back in the day.

d20110816_0081

Here’s the old passenger train station – my father and I bid a sad but hopeful farewell to my mother here one winter, as she went to Toronto on her own to try and find work and establish a beachhead there for us.  It seems to be undergoing renovations now.

Brandon was also home to the restaurant that provided my all-time favorite dessert, but as I blogged previously, that site is now a smoking crater.

One last thing about Brandon – this downtown corner:

d20110816_0082

The camera store where my parents bought me my first SLR (a Pentax ESII) is a few blocks from here, but that’s not the interesting thing.  For some reason I associate this corner – actually a particular view of it that I could never have seen in person – with date and time manipulation while programming.  Whenever I work with dates and times while programming – especially with the C# DateTime and TimeSpan types – this corner of Brandon pops into my head.  Weird, huh?  I have no idea how that association could have been formed.  It might have even been formed by a dream.

[gmap type=”satellite” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110816.kml” visible=”true” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]

 

« Previous PageNext Page »