Day 13, Part 2: Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
Thunder Bay, Ontario to Winnipeg, Manitoba

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I am ultimately planning on spending the night in Winnipeg, but I have one last adventure to take care of before I get there.

It's 50 miles away from the highway, at the end of this empty gravel road...

Which takes me back across the border to the Northwest Angle of Minnesota, or the "chimney" of the state, as my brother and I used to call it.

The border itself is so remote that it sits unguarded by any customs or border patrol agents. Instead, there is simply a long series of signs by the roadside which attempt to guilt you into checking in with customs via video phone at a place called "Jim's Corner".

The forest has been clear cut all the way down the border between the two countries. I temporarily wonder how the workers who had to do *that* enjoyed dealing with the mosquitoes and the black flies.

This is what Jim's Corner looks like. I don't know who Jim was, or what he had to do with this corner, but I decide to check in anyway, just because I think it might be fun.

When I talk to the American customs agent on the other end of the video phone in the little booth, all she seems to be interested in knowing is what the license plate number is on my car.


The only settlement in the Northwest Angle that you can drive to is called Angle Inlet, which--after all of the emptiness on the way in here--turns out to be a surprisingly normal-looking northern Minnesota town. I am happy to find a plaque dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, who, in all of his inestimable vision and foresight, inadvertently picked up the Angle for the United States when he hammered out the Treaty of Paris with the British in 1783.

That's the Lake of the Woods, again, in the background of this picture. Somewhere out there in the water is an even remoter American settlement called Oak Island, which I did not visit.


I was happy to see that time hadn't had that much of an effect on the residents of Angle Inlet. There was even an old fashioned phone booth near the intersection of the town's two main roads.

After taking a few pictures, I ate dinner in the town's one and only drinking/eating establishment, temporarily making friends with the barmaid and the solitary patron I found sitting there when I opened the door. I talked with both of them for awhile, trying to find out what had brought them to this place. The guy sitting at the bar next to me said that he had originally come from Kansas City, but had come here to escape the stress of the "big city" and settle down into a more laid back sort of lifestyle. The woman working behind the bar had originally grown up in Warroad, on the southern shore of the lake, but had moved up here a few years ago to operate the ferry service that takes tourists over to Oak Island. She didn't have a whole lot to say when I asked her about the Warroad hockey team, surprisingly enough.

They both seemed to be pretty happy with life in the remotest part of Minnesota. As I talked to them, I plowed through a burger with mushrooms and cheese and noticed that there were literally hundreds of fishing pictures plastered on the walls and on top of the bar. Some of the fish in the pictures had to have been at least four feet long. When the bartender turns the TV to the Discovery Channel so that everybody can watch "Deadliest Catch", I take that as my cue to leave and bid everyone goodbye.


On my way back to the Trans-Canada Highway, I saw a very strange looking animal, trotting along the edge of the roadway.

It turned out to be a fox, with a dead rabbit hanging out of its mouth.

When I finally get back to the highway, I drive for several more miles through the forest before it abruptly ends and spits me out into the immensely flat and empty plains of southern Manitoba. The former bed of ancient Lake Agassiz. From there I continue on through territory that seems more or less familiar, sensing that my latest round of trans-continental adventures has just about come to an end.

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