The day started at 07:00 with the ringing of the alarm on my phone. There was a lot of driving to do, so we wanted to get an early start. The hotel reservation included breakfast, so after getting ready we went down to the hotel restaurant where we were given a small boxed breakfast. We ate quickly, then packed up the car and pulled away from the hotel.
I was in the driver’s seat for the first leg of the day. The battery was still mostly full from the supercharge the night before, so we didn’t have to make any charging stops before leaving for Timmins. Our route took us through Sudbury to reach Highway ON-144, which runs north from Highway 1 up to Highway ON-101. The ON-144 is on the west side of Sudbury, and our hotel was on the north east side of the city, so we had to drive back through downtown Sudbury to start the morning off. Thankfully rush hour traffic was pretty light, and we encountered only minimal traffic on our way to ON-144. We passed several large mines as we drove out of the city, giving us a quick view of one of the major industries in Sudbury. After driving past the mines we continued through through a few small towns, but after 15 or 20 minutes of driving the surrounding scenery was just forests, lakes and exposed bedrock.
The scenery was quite beautiful, and the driving was very easy. The terrain was fairly hilly, and there were many small and medium sized lakes that we passed as we drove north. The car came programmed with the location of all of the Supercharger stations in North America, and it also had information about the location of other affiliated chargers, so as we drove away from Sudbury we began to receive warnings that we were not going to be able to reach any known charging points with the battery range remaining. We had previously mapped out our trip and knew there was a charging point in Timmins that the car didn’t know about, however it was still a bit disconcerting to be behind the wheel of an electric car warning you that you would not be able to reach its destination. We pressed on, though there was a bit of discussion of what to do if the charger in Timmins was unavailable or broken.
After a couple of hours of driving we pulled off to the side of the road to stretch our legs and change drivers. Patrick took the wheel and did the last hour or so of driving to Timmins. The sky had gotten quite cloudy by the time we reached Timmins, but thankfully it was not raining. We pulled into the Rush Truck Centre on the outskirts of Timmins, and were quite happy to discover that the charging point there was available and functional. Ironically there was a large, lifted truck parked right in front of the charger - perhaps this was to be expected at a truck sales and servicing business. Thankfully the charger was equipped with a long (3+ meter) charging cable that was able to reach the car from the next parking spot. The charger at the truck stop was not a Supercharger, which meant it was going to take several hours to fully charge the car, however the charging point was available and free to use, so it was a fair trade-off. Once we had the car plugged in and confirmed it was charging, we began walking to a restaurant for lunch.
On the drive into town I had been looking for places to eat that were close to the charger, and I had settled on Matti’s Family Restaurant as it looked good and was only a 10 minute walk. Unfortunately there were no sidewalks in this part of Timmins, so we had to walk on the shoulder of the highway to reach the restaurant. Thankfully it was quite a wide shoulder, so cars were never too close to us. Matti’s was located in the same building as an Esso gas station; while it had a fair bit of seating it was packed. There was a short wait to get a table, however once we sat down the service was great and we were able to order quickly. I ordered a burger and poutine for lunch, and when the food arrived it was pretty tasty. After we finished lunch we walked back to the car, which had charged enough to allow us to reach Cochrane with about 100 km of range to spare. This was enough for us to feel comfortable with, so we unplugged the car and continued on.
Our route took us through downtown Timmins in order to reach Highway ON-655, which would take us up to the northern leg of the TransCanada highway. As we drove through Timmins we kept our eye out for the former site of the Shania Twain museum at Todd’s request. The museum opened in 2001 to celebrate the life of the Canadian singer, who was raised in Timmins, however it closed in 2013 due to poor attendance. It is now the site of an open pit gold mine, which meant we didn’t get a great view of the former location. Right after the mine we turned left onto ON-655 and drove north.
Once we left Timmins we settled back into being on the highway. When the Tesla navigation system has a destination set, it will warn you if your driving behaviour is going to prevent you from reaching the set destination given the amount of battery charge still in the car. The navigation system will suggest a maximum speed, and it will remind you of this if you exceed it. Thankfully we had more range than we needed, but we were still keeping to roughly the speed limit while we were driving on ON-655. In some cases this was not fast enough for the vehicles around us - at one point a school bus sped past us doing easily 110 km/h. Ironically enough, shortly after we were passed by the school bus we encountered a road construction crew that was repaving the highway, and we had to stop since our lane was being used to route opposite direction traffic around the construction. We saw the school bus that had passed us only a couple of cars ahead.
The construction on ON-655 added maybe 20 minutes to the trip, but soon enough we reached the end of the highway and turned right onto the northern leg of the TransCanada highway, named ON-11. We reached Cochrane shortly after turning onto ON-11 - the traffic was definitely much heavier on ON-11 than it had been on the earlier segments of our drive.
After arriving in Cochrane, we drove right to the Polar Bear Habitat. This was one of the few attractions in Cochrane we had planned to visit ahead of our trip, and so we wanted to make sure we arrived with plenty of time to explore. The polar bear habitat is a large, 24 acre site that allows the 3 resident polar bears to live in an environment quite similar to what they would experience in the wild. Once we entered the site we learned that one of the bears had wandered to the edge of its enclosure, giving people the ability to see him up close. We were quite lucky as he was still near the fence when we reached him, and we were able to see just how large he was. This enclosure was right beside a second one holding another bear, and we were able to get a pretty good view of him as well.
In addition to the polar bears, the site of the Polar Bear habitat is home to a historic village, and after seeing both Inukshuk and Ganuk (the polar bears) Patrick & I wandered through the historic village.
Looping back from the village took us past the polar bear enclosure, and the first bear (Inukshuk) was no longer visible. We did not get to see the third bear, unfortunately, but given the size of the habitat we counted ourselves lucky we were able to see two of the three bears! As we were walking out through the main building, we were informed that they also had a museum of historic snowmobiles, and so we took a quick detour and walked through a building that easily had over 100 snowmobiles from the 50’s and 60’s through to the 80’s. It was neat to see how many different forms early snowmobiles took, and how very primitive some of them were.
We left the polar bear habitat after about an hour, and went to our next stop - the Cochrane train station. We explored the station and the yard a bit, then continued on to our next destination - the Tim Horton museum. Tim Horton, founder of the eponymous coffee chain, grew up in Cochrane, and the town has a small museum dedicated to his careers (both hockey and refreshments) in the local hockey arena. We had to do a quick COVID temperature check in order to enter the arena, and then were able to walk through the small exhibit and take a few photos. It was about as grand as I expected for a small town hockey rink museum, but it was still neat to see. We only spent about 15 minutes here before continuing on.
The arena was close to the Cochrane water tower, which was unfortunately backlit by the sun, leading to a less than ideal photo. It turns out that Todd’s maternal grandfather constructed this water tower, which was a neat bit of family history for the trip! After leaving the arena we took a quick trip out to see the Cochrane airport, just to check another airport off the list, however it was very small and we didn’t go inside.
After coming back into town we drove to the small lake, named Commando Lake, that is in the centre of town. We went for a walk around the lake to enjoy the late afternoon sun and to get some fresh air.
It was getting close to dinner time by the time we finished our walk, so we drove to our hotel and checked in. We had a room booked at the Westway Motel. We chose the motel as it was the only place in Cochrane that had a Tesla-compatible electric vehicle charger, and the charge was included in the room rate. We unpacked the car and got it charging, then started walking to a restaurant for dinner. We had originally planned on eating at the 49th Parallel Kitchen & Bar, however when we arrived shortly after 18:00 we learned that they were fully booked for the evening, and it wasn’t expected there would be any space. We walked back to a different restaurant we had passed on the walk, J R Bar-B-Q Ranch, and were able to get a table there. The meal was pretty good - we both had BBQ ribs and a beer. The restaurant wasn’t terribly busy so the service was quite fast. While we were eating we discussed our plans for the next couple of days, chatted about what we’d seen thus far, and just about life in general. Once we finished dinner we went for another walk around the Ontario Northland station area, and watched a switcher shunting some cars around. Once it started to get dark out we walked back to the hotel, where we watched a bit of TV and then called it a night.