This week the crew of UNORT left the road behind and ventured up the steel rails of the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee with our sights fixed firmly on James Bay. We stayed at a great B&B, arguably the most inviting and comfortable of the trip, took a magical day trip out to the mouth of the Moose River and the start of James Bay courtesy of Jenn Little and Nolan Tozer of Moose River Tours, stepped out onto the clay flats that extend for miles and roasted smokies at the quarry like real locals.
This was one of our most enthralling experiences, with each of us coming away with a wide array of thoughts and feelings. No other place provoked quite as much of a response as our sojourn to one of Ontario’s earliest settlements. Suffice to say, we’re eager to return someday.
Episode Five will bring a gold mine tour in Timmins, a touch of glamping at WildExodus in Timmins, ATVing in Chapleau and some incredible scenery and motorcycling roads in Algoma Country!
You really captured the sense of being far away from the rest of the world in this piece. It was quite beautiful and in a way mystic. It made me want to know more about what I was seeing. What are these places you are showing us? What stories have you learned here about them? Where are you now? Where are you going here? What is the back story? Why are those dogs being dropped off here? Who is your guide? What is his story? What is special about the place he is taking you? Why are you going there? What are these pictures we are looking at? Who is this woman? What is her story? It would have made it doubly interesting to have learned something about the place and the people as well as seeing its beauty. I would love to be able to watch this a second time with Mike’s commentary added. I guess I want to experience as much of the stimuli that provoked your strong response to it as possible.
We really wanted to represent what the trip was for us…or maybe more specifically for me. I had only ever looked at a map and wondered what was going on up there. And without much preparation, research or understanding I just wandered into this place, was told to go to a boat and pay a man 15 dollars to go see an island. We could have put together something more informative, but I thought it would be better to pique curiosity, just as mine had been piqued by a dot on a map. And it was cloudy and stormy for both days, which lent this extra mysterious quality to everything.