On Sunday July 6, 1986 we were up pretty early: 5:30 was early by the standards of this trip. The next two days would be very full on this part of the Trans Canada Highway as we mad our way from Rainy Lake to Kakabeka Falls our our next designated rest spot. Oddly enough all we had for breakfast that day was bread and we were on the road by 6:50, peddling our way eastward on Ontario Highway 11. Though it really wasn’t breakfast it was just something to fill the void we were feeling in our stomachs.
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| Just East of Rainy River, Ontario |
About 22 kilometres down the road from where we had rested we came a little town by the name of Emo. There was nothing particular about that town that I made note of in my travel log, though we did stop there for a complete breakfast. Once again I delve into the annals of Wikipedia in order to flush out my tale of 35 years ago. “Emo was officially created on July 1, 1899, and celebrated its centennial in 1999. Emo's first reeve was Alexander Luttrell, an Irishman who named the town after a namesake village in Ireland near where he was born.” Apparently the town is now famous for two things: its stock car races and its Emo Walleye Classic a catch and release fishing tournament; when we were passing through Emo the second of its claims to fame didn't exist. The tournament was about 18 years away from being born, while the stock car races came into being some 32 years before we were going through that little town.
In retrospect it seems odd that all I write about is food and when we stop for food. Two entries in a row are about eating in Fort Frances and then stopping Emo and then stopping for lunch. It was really only about 35 kilometres down the road from Emo. How we had gotten so hungry in say the two to two and a half hours we had possibly ridden that morning is a mystery. How we had gotten so hungry in say the two to two and a half hours we had possibly ridden that morning is a mystery.
It was in this Ontario-Minnesota border town, just across the Rainy River lies International Falls Minnesota, oddly enough there are no falls so what were the founders of that community drinking? However, there is a hydro-electric power station located there to harness the power of the Rainy River. It was just outside of Fort Frances that we met two older men on motorcycles from a place called Togo, Saskatchewan. Thirty-five years ago that little town had a population of 186 people, so these two guys must have known pretty well everyone. From Wikipedia I gleaned the following information: “Togo incorporated as a village on September 4, 1906.[3] This village was founded after the Japanese had won several victories in the war against Russia (Russo-Japanese War 1904–05). Britain was allied with Japan in this war and Japan was a very popular nation throughout the British Empire. Three towns in Saskatchewan along the CN line (Togo, Kuroki, Mikado),[4] a regional park (Oyama),[5] and CN Siding (Fukushiama)[6] were named in honour of Japanese achievements in this war.”
Crossing Rainy Lake
We didn’t scoff down food in Fort Frances, which lies on the Canadian side of the Rainy River separating Minnesota and Ontario, proper but somewhere a little further up the road where we could see Rainy Lake proper, probably some six kilometres further eastward. It was quite the impressive body of water with a surface area of 932 km2 . And no, it wasn’t something healthy that we scoffed down, but something these guys from Togo were calling dog hots. Yes, you read that right and it’s not to be confused as being the Togolese Republic wedged between Ghana on its west and Benin on its east, though it was two older guys from Togo Saskatchewan mentioned above. However; there is in fact is an area in the Sudbury District of Ontario and falls between Ontario Highway 144 to the west and southward to Sudbury from Timmins and Highway 11 to the east as it runs from Matheson to North Bay, Ontario We thought it must have been some strange local dialect or just some strange form of oral dyslexia.
