I don’t think I have ever heard anyone mention the town of Wawa on the northeast corner of Lake Superior, so to speak, except people who have driven from Western to Central Canada north of the lake. They are almost always Winnipeggers or ex-Winnipeggers. Wawa is the natural place to sleep mid-journey if you are making the trip in two days, or, as in my case, in four.
But as I’ve mentioned before, Wawa had a different significance for me, making my trip in an EV. The span between Sault Ste Marie and Wawa is the longest I will have to cross in my entire 10,000 kilometre journey without a charging station. I made it, a little nervously, with maybe 60 kilometres’ range to spare.
On my way here from Ottawa over the last two days, I am afraid northern Ontario has whipped by me in more of a blur than I would have liked.
My lovely friend Shannon Proudfoot sent me an early morning DM on Friday in preparation for my transit through the Sault on my way to Wawa. Apparently there is a hotly contested debate in the Sault between the advocates of Mrs. B’s pizza and Aurora’s—two rival chains working from the same family pizza recipe. I would have loved to try a slice! (You can read Shannon’s graceful prose and sharp insights at the Globe and Mail, these days, by the way.)
Unfortunately, I am finding that my plan of driving 400-500 kilometres a day in my EV is not providing as much down time to explore the region as I had hoped. Though I am an early riser and set off early, the unpredictable charging times mean that even without unnecessary stops I don’t reach my final destination for the day until towards the end of the afternoon.
I suppose I should be grateful that one of the two Ivy chargers at the Tim Hortons in Blind River was working, because if not, it was touch-and-go whether I could reach the Sault on the charge I had. On the other hand, the 85 minute time it told me it would take to charge me up from 55% to 100% was, er, a bit of a shock. It turned out not to be quite that bad. I charged for about 45 minutes and was on my way. (And, yes, I am getting a bit of a hate-on for Ivy, which also slowed me down on my first day.)
The result of the unexpectedly long charging times is that I am glimpsing the region more than drinking it in. I do have a few observations, though.
The first is that there are a lot more weed stores than there are EV chargers. I can report that should you find yourself unexpectedly sober in northern Ontario, or even stalled on the side of the road for lack of electricity, there’s a reasonable chance that you can walk, or obtain a short hitchhike, to a cannabis store. In the future, the ratio of EV chargers to weed stores may be regarded as a crucial metric in evaluating the success of civilizations.
More seriously, just walking around Sudbury, you can see that it is a place where the social services are under extreme stress. I don’t know why I was surprised to see so many homeless people sleeping rough in the downtown. Maybe it was the brutally cold wind, even on April’s Eve. Maybe it is that I associate the homeless problem with bigger cities.
Another data point. I was staying at the Clarion Inn in downtown Sudbury, a destination plucked from a travel site based on its extremely reasonable price. I noticed on my first ride up the elevator that three floors in this five-storey hotel were “closed” according to a sign. I assumed that meant that they had been shut off during the pandemic for lack of customers and hadn’t yet been re-opened.
But when I was checking out on Friday morning, the doors to the elevator opened on one of the “closed” floors, and what I saw was a health care worker sitting, masked, beside a cart full of milk jugs. A diminutive young woman, also masked, squeezed on the elevator between me and my luggage cart. I asked her what was going on. She said that earlier in the pandemic, the three floors had been taken over as a long-term care facility.
“They want us to leave now,” she said, “but the hospital here is at 110% capacity, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
I couldn’t find the breakdown for just northern Ontario, or more recent data, but in the entire province there are 1,700 EV charging stations.
In June 2022, there were 1,351 cannabis stores in the province.
I can confirm that Wawa was a name that struck the hearts of hitchhikers in the 1970s. You prayed your ride would go through it because there were so many stories of people stuck for days and even weeks in Wawa -- and one (probably apocryphal) story of a guy who never got out (he finally walked into town, where he met a girl, got a job, bought a house etc.)
Love the photos, especially that first one of the lake.