"I can't get over how beautiful Ontario is."

I agree with Natalie.

It's 6:15 p.m. and we're still about two hours outside of Thunder Bay despite having been on the road for nine hours already.

All of a sudden, Grant brakes hard and pulls over on the side of the four-lane highway beside a MASSIVE rock wall that is easily 30 feet high. About 100 feet ahead of where we've stopped, there is a cliff ledge over-looking a lake that looks hazy in the July heat.

"What do you think?" he says.

"I think it's picture time," says Natalie, from the back seat of the trailer cab.

Grant, Natalie, Cassandra and I climb out of the cab while Mike and Josh get out the Flex parked behind us. The truck has never looked more epic next to this rock wall.


Since the highway is empty, we stand in the middle of the road and admire it for a bit. We've discovered that there's really no such thing as traffic up here, except for the odd car or tractor trailer. We hear them long before we see them though since it's so quiet.

But what we're experiencing is not a normal quiet. It's not like the sound of your room when you're sleeping, or the muffled air of a movie theatre before it fills up. It's a silence that's consequence of 35 degree air idling in the atmosphere. The trees are still. Your conversation echoes. You can't feel any wind. Just the heatwaves beating down on your arms.

We decide to walk down to the edge of the cliff to get a better view of the lake.


Breathtaking.

Flawless.

The most natural serenity.

All you can hear is the pulsing lake waves crawling onto the sand below us, and the clicks of our camera shutters as we try to capture it.

It's July 5th - summertime - and we're standing on a highway a few hours outside of Thunder Bay overlooking a scene that belongs on a calender.

It's amazing that the promotion of chicken hot dogs has brought us here.