Wawa

Wawa
Another long day of driving and tomorrow is more of the same. Canada is a big country, kind of an understatement, and we’ve put a lot of miles behind us. The good thing is, after tomorrow, the driving distances will dramatically decline (of course, I’ll finally have someone to share the driving with when there won’t be so much of it).
Wawa is kind of a shock. Well, the town isn’t. More of the same: boarded up buildings, buildings in various states of deterioration. I can’t decide if there was a time this place was booming? But would that have been back in the heyday of the railroad? Wawa is also a city that was build to service the Canadian Northern and Pacific (like every other town we’ve been in). I don’t think I realized just how much the railroad determined the development of North America and, it seems, particularly Canada. America has spread far beyond her original rail lines, but Canada’s population centers still seem clustered around train stops (to their detriment?).
The shock was the seclusion and relative lack of amenities of the lodging. Coming from McVicar manor which might be described as a small (okay, very small) castle to a summer house. There is indoor plumbing but the water is from a well and it’s yellow and stinky and I can’t even drink tea in it. The rooms have very comfortable beds but the standard two pillows and almost no where to put anything. The “table” between the beds is a tv tray and I’m afraid if I put something on it, it will collapse. We killed three spiders within seconds of entering the room (which doesn’t really bother me, but it adds to the general sense of malaise) and to top it off, when we got here the guy, Ben, who took us to our room literally walked us to the door and said goodbye.
We were very clueless and made him hang around to answer a few questions, like “is there a key to the room?” (no, no one comes in here—this statement was emphatically denied by the fact that in the common room past our room were 30 20-24 year olds hanging out). Where is the bathroom (over there)? And then he was gone. We didn’t know when breakfast was, when our kayaking was, if there were any hiking trails etc. Ironically, there is a folder in the room and it has a nice envelope that says, “Maps. Please don’t remove the maps. Only a very bad person raised by deplorable parents would take these maps”. The folder was empty. So we didn’t even have any maps (I’m not sure what the maps were of, but I’m sure we wanted them!).
Well, we were determined to make the best of it, so we decided to go eat. Food cures all malaise. On our way to our car, dwarfed in the gravel parking lot by the ginormous Ford trucks better equipped to traverse the gravel, dirt and pot hole roads to the lodge, we ran into another person, who must have noticed we looked a bit confused. She asked us if we needed anything. I explained we were supposed to be kayaking in the morning and didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing. Her response was, meet at the beach at 9am and she turned to walk off. But, we delayed her, what beach? What should we wear? Perhaps she had been hoping to avoid this question because her answer just made us more freaked out: bathing suits.
Now, perhaps this doesn’t sound too threatening, but we were currently in jeans, shirts, sweatshirts and we were cold and we were NOT in the water. The thought of putting on a bathing suit and going onto the lake was not appealing (not to mention the clouds of mosquitos). Then she mentioned we could put on wet suits (good) because we were going to have to do a “wet exit” (bad, very, very bad). She said this as if we would know what it was. We didn’t but it did not sound good. She was gone before we could probe further. We headed to the car and proceeded to exaggerate and flame our fears (she’s going to push the boat over and we have to somehow get out of the kayak seats; we have to run and jump into the lake and climb into the boat and while paddling someone will suddenly push the boat over, scenarios like that). I tried to think of who I could blame for this stupid decision to kayak. Who made us do this?
Then we started to psyche ourselves up: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself! It will only be a few minutes of wetness (although then we remembered Ashley mentioning that we might feel a ‘bit damp” for JUST three-four hours). We can do anything, etc. with this renewed optiomism, we headed to dinner which took us 20 miles and ½ hour to locate even though the restaurant was only 5 minutes away (perhaps our anticipation for the kayaking was interfering with our brain processes). I will post about dinner in my next post: the worst meal yet.