Les Flâneurs: Agawa Canyon Train Tour

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Agawa Canyon Train Tour

Susie and I decided to spend our 40th wedding anniversary doing something we've never done before: take a long trip requiring multiple stops for charging our electric car followed by spending a full day on a train in the wilds of Ontario, Canada, watching several million trees pass by.

We left Grand Rapids Saturday morning and after stopping in Cadillac and Gaylord Michigan to charge our car (both times at a Meijer grocery store) we arrived at the Mackinac Bridge. Unfortunately there was a Mini Cooper Rally underway and apparently one lane of the bridge was closed for that event.

Although we never did see any lane closure it took us -- wait for it -- an hour and thirty minutes to cross some 5 miles of the bridge complex. But we were given the chance to pay a toll for such a profoundly moving experience. . .

Once in St. Ignace it was a short ride across the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula and we had virtually no wait at the Canadian border. Although a small city, Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, proved a challenge to navigate and for once we had to use the car's GPS system to locate our hotel, the Water Tower Inn.

Even though it was after 5pm I learned our room wasn't ready yet so we decided to charge our car at a nearby Ivy charging station while we waited -- a process that was made much easier by the kindness of a young couple who were quite familiar with this particular charging company. It should be noted that they along with their three little girls were on an adventure of their own: driving their all-electric Kia all the way to British Columbia! It also gave us a chance to sit at the hotel bar and have a cold glass of beer while we waited both for the room and the charging to finish.

That evening we had an unremarkable meal at the hotel's restaurant.

The following day we made our way downtown to the train station located in the shadow of the International Bridge to the USA. Boarding began at 7:30am and by 8:00 we were under way north out of the city threading our way past an enormous steel mill complex and then several dozen (?) lakes and small camps and cabins through innumerable forests until we arrived at the Canyon park at about 12:30pm.

Susie and I found a place to enjoy our box lunch (prepared by the less-than-stellar culinary minions at our hotel) and strolled along the Agawa River taking in the quiet.

Back aboard the train, which had moved the locomotives from front to back for the return trip, we spent the next 4.5 hours enjoying the same scenery but in reverse. Riveting.

While the day had been gorgeous, the weather fine and the train not too crowded, this is not something either of us would recommend.

It is, in a word, boring. Mind you this would have been an incredible train ride had it followed Rte 17 along the eastern shore of Lake Superior instead of wending its way some miles inland through the never-ending forest.

The dining car is long gone replaced by a snack bar where the food was prepackaged and none of it looked terribly appealing. There were multiple TV monitors in each car which allowed the passengers to watch the locomotive camera which was rather fascinating but that only worked on the outbound leg of the trip; and in our car nearly half the monitors were missing, The bathrooms were very basic with an emphasis on very and there didn't appear to be any consideration for those travelers in need of disability facilities.

After arriving back at the station we walked across the parking lot to the old paper mill complex, part of which has been repurposed into an event venue along with an eatery or two. We chose the Mill Steakhouse but contrary to the name Susie and I each had fish 'n chips; or rather she had the chips and I had onion rings (in memory of my dad who loved to make them almost as much as he loved to eat them). The food was quite good, the beer cold and the service friendly, professional and at least as good as the food.

The next morning we packed up, grabbed a coffee at the Starbucks in the hotel and returned to United States. Crossing the border took only a few minutes and there was no wait at the Mackinac Bridge. We replayed our outbound charging legs, stopping again at Gaylord and then Cadillac to use the Electrify America stations. Each time we stopped to charge we met the nicest people. A couple of times we needed assistance and there was always someone also charging willing and able to help us work out our issue. And once Susie ended up helping a woman from Wisconsin get herself set up for charging her VW! One wonders if this was what it was like in the early days of the internal combustion engines, people helping each other so they can get back on the road. Pretty cool.

The silver lining in all this -- and it came to us as we were chugging along-- is we could sit back and do nothing, think nothing, worry about nothing. Not a bad way to spend the day after all, eh?