Our tour wouldn’t be complete without our semiannual lunch at Bren’s Bake Shop in Belleville, and we managed to squeak it into the plan for Saturday on our way to Ottawa. We got a nice warm welcome and wolfed down some soup quickly. We found out we had some time to kill when we got to Ottawa, which gave me an opportunity to wander around the Market area of Ottawa, where I’d never been. It is, as you may have suspected, largely a market.

I’ve been excited about playing at Zaphod Beeblebrox for years, not just because it’s famed in the area for the great music they bring in, but because the name comes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and I used to have those books practically memorized. The universe didn’t end while we were in there (not that I noticed anyway) but I had a sip of a friend’s Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and it had the desired effect.

The bill included The Swingers, The Sheepdogs, and We Were Lovers. I missed The Swingers, alas, while I was eating fish & chips down the street with some old friends. The Sheepdogs are from Saskatoon and do a damn fine southern rock ‘n’ roll kind of thing. We Were Lovers, of course, you’ve heard of on this blog before and I have to say again, all the rumours about what Jordan did are totally false. Just ask Marcus.

I loved playing at Zaphod’s! There was a good crowd and they were very enthusiastic and vocal and we just fed off of the energy. There was much dancing, just when I was beginning to think Ontario doesn’t do the dancing thing. A few of the people in the crowd had seen us at Westfest and brought friends out. We played a really solid and energetic set. To top it all off, Zaphod’s gave us a recording of our show, so we’ll be sharing a few choice tracks with you at some point in the not-terribly-distant future.

All in all, it was a great way to end our time in Southern Ontario.

The next two days were pretty intense heavy-duty serious driving days to get to our Thunder Bay show on Wednesday night. The shortest route was the northern highway past North Bay, which would be 16 hours of drive time. Tuesday we started around 10:30 AM and stopped in Pembroke for lunch, where we parked the van next to two army tanks with signs on them saying “STUDENT DRIVER". Another truck pulled two trailers in a train behind it, one carrying a dead moose.

The drive up towards North Bay was absolutely beautiful, as the fall colours grew more intense the further north we went. After North Bay the landscape started getting more rugged and coniferous, but with pretty ponds and lakes still dotting the scenery here and there. We kept our eyes peeled for moose but saw none.

We stopped for dinner in Kirkland Lake, where the only restaurant we could find still open at 7:30 PM was a Chinese/Canadian place called, I think, Pagoda. As we sat, travel-dazed, and staring at the menu, we thought we heard the waitress say “…Oh, she just loves to choke the chicken!” We soon learned what she was talking about.

You just can’t get service like that at Subway, I’m telling you.

We finally ended up in Kapuskasing around 11 PM and I was asleep almost immediately. It’s funny how sitting in a van for that length of time wears you out. I wasn’t even driving!

The most remarkable thing about the drive from Kapuskasing to Thunder Bay was on how little there was to remark on. Even the Trans-Canada has a fair number of little towns along the way, random gas stations, whatever. I think we had a 2-hour stretch where there was absolutely nothing besides trees and the occasional sign. And since Rogers’ cell service stops at Kapuskasing, three-quarters of the van was in radio silence all day. You don’t really feel like you’re “getting away from it all", though, because ultimately you’re still in a van, moving, not interacting with nature in any way… but at least it’s far more pleasant to look at than another one of those damn “Smart Centres” with the Wal-Mart and Home Depot and six acres of parking lot!

Marcus: 2
Rob: off the scale + 2
Kirsten: 2
Joey: off the scale