Leg 12 - Soo to Toronto

After a really pathetic breakfast, we left at 9.30am. Gosh! You would think when they say "Continental" breakfast there would be something besides old bagels and muffins! I guess i shouldn't really complain since we do stay at pretty inexpensive places....! Anyway, we left at about 9.30 am. But I am sorely disappointed at the lack of scenery along the way. All we saw was rocky hills on either side of the road for miles and miles with not one glimpse of the lakes. The names of the towns sounded cool.....very Frenchy sounding, but they were really nothing at all. I saw something all along the way that i am very curious about. All the rocky hills had a stack of stones on them, either shaped like an inverted "V", or stacked to look like a man with a head and 2 legs. They were about a foot and a half high. Many of them were intact and many had toppled over. I wonder if it is a Native American ritual of some sort......we did pass thru many Native American reservations. Hmmm....i have to investigate!

We stopped for lunch at "The Chaplain Inn" at the French River. I know it sounds fancy, but NO, its not what you think. It was a run down sort of dilapidated place, better looking on the inside than the outside and I think we were the first customers of the day. The lady running the place was sort of like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi. We looked over the menu and when we asked what the soup of the day was (it was listed on the menu) she said sternly..."No soup today"..!!! Thats it! The only vegetarian sandwich listed was a tomato and lettuce so R very nicely asked for a veggie sandwich....she looked at him and said.."We don't have that", so he replied "Can you make me a veggie sandwich with everything on it" and she retorted "No substitutions, only what's on the menu".....I wanted to say at that point that it really wasn't a substitution we were asking for but rather an addition, but better sense prevailed!! I bit my tongue and kept quiet! The fries that came along with it were GOOD! Not the processed extruded stuff you get at McD but hand cut fries with the skins on them. Yum! So really it ended up being OK.

We got into Toronto at 5pm. I think we should have studied Canadian road rules before getting here. We got on the carpool lane on the freeway heading to my cousin's place. Traffic was horrendous, so we were feeling pretty thrilled at whizzing by in the car pool lane. When we saw our exit coming up we had to move over 4 lanes from the carpool lane on the extreme left to the exit lane on the extreme right. So we did the usual move over, lane by lane. People were honking madly at us and we didn't know exactly why. Well, it turns out that you can merge onto a non carpool lane only at specified points, not when and where you like!!! No wonder they were annoyed!My cousin in Seattle, Jaisri, has a brother who stays at Mississauga, so we went over to his place. He stays in a really nice apt. with a guest room in the lobby for visiting guests, so we stayed the night there. Toronto is nice, a lot like Seattle. Spent the evening with them. I mentioned the absence of Starbucks stores and my cousin told me that in Canada, the coffee king is Tim Horton's. We saw many along the way, have to check one out tomorrow. Didn't take a single picture today, nothing worth taking!

Fyi - gas in Canada is a lot more expensive than the US, about $3.70 for a gallon, so maybe we shouldn't be complaining too much....!

P.S. On further research it seems that stacking rocks is some kind of ancient Shamanic ritual to demonstrate balance. This is what one site says "The rocks have demonstrated some things about balance. I can stack only so many of them on top of each other before they start to topple. The more things we take on in our lives, the more fragile the "balance" of our lives becomes.

I chose the stones in order of size and stacked them accordingly. Sort of like chosing priorities. Or, perhaps like making a stronger foundation for the other rocks...or corresponding things in my life.".....Fascinating!