Thunder Bay

When I was a young teen, I used to get up very early to do barn chores and listen to the farm report on the radio. The grain reports came from Thunder Bay, Ontario, and I developed a highly-romanticized idea of what that Lake Superior city looked like. Western mining towns, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, lumberjacks, nomadic cowboys riding combines up and down the grain belt with the seasons—this is what I saw when I heard that magical name.

It turns out it’s just like South Buffalo, but with fewer Tim Hortons.

In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.