Day 23 - Lakehead

Hello friends, today I had the chance to explore a lot of Thunder Bay and meet up with a lot of really cool people along the way. There is so much natural beauty to Thunder Bay, and so much to see. My only issue with this city is the fact that there aren't that many places to eat that aren't either fast food or ridiculously expensive, so this is not really a places for all the foodies out there. Aside from that, I loved my time here.

I started my day by heading over to Lakehead University. I've kinda visited their campus one time before when I was here for FYIC 2018, so it was nice to get to see more of it. When I stopped by their ESS office, I noticed that the door was partly opened, so I knocked and met 2 of the ESS Exec, Brent and Mitch. They were nice enough to show me around campus a bit, and told me some stories about their campus. Fun Facts: Their mascot is a cannon that gets painted every year based on the colour of the winning Frosh team (either yellow or blue I believe), and they have developed a 5 year plan in order to be able to actual fire their cannon as a show of school spirit. The Engineers and the Outdoor Recreation students are always "fighting" and pranking each other, and as the legend goes, the Rec students once put their cannon in the lake on their campus. When we got back to the ESS office, I got the chance to put on the moose costume, and take a picture with their mascot "The Moose". One other cool thing that I noticed is that, while other schools don't even have a school sign, Lakehead has 4! Lakehead also has random piece of art all around their campus, which I kinda missed seeing as the last few schools were pretty low on those.

After finishing up on campus, I wanted to explore more of the area based on the research I did and the recommendations that I've been given. First thing I did was go to a place called "The Persian Man" to get the famous "Persian", which is a cinnamon bun with pink strawberry icing on top. It was pretty good, but WAY too sweet. What I did next was actually one of the highlights of my trip thus far. I visited the Terry Fox Monument here in Thunder Bay, and the significance of this is that I saw the monument in St. John's, NL where Terry Fox started his journey, and today I saw the place where Terry Fox ended his journey. This meant a lot to me because I've done the same trip but with a car, and I can only imagine the strength it took for Terry to do all of this on his own, and so I left there feeling very inspired by it.

I then went to explore the more scenic parts of Thunder Bay. I first visited Centennial Park, which has a lot of really pretty hiking trails, and there was a cycling race happening today, so there were lots of people around. After hiking for about 45 minutes, I went down to Hillcrest Park, which has a beautiful view of Lake Superior and some parts of the town. It's apparently a great place to go to see the fireworks on Canada Day, and I can definitely see why. I also went to Marina Park, which is a small park right by the waterfront next to the piers. The interesting thing about this park was that presence of a sign that stated how Thunder Bay had "Sister Cities" in other countries including Japan, China, Finland and the USA, which I thought was pretty cool. My last bit of nature for today was my visit to Mount McKay. I didn't get to go up the mountain, but being able to be so close to it was a pretty awesome experience in and of itself, so I'm pretty happy about that.

I then met up with my friend, Julie Hauth, who took me to "Marla Mae", a Thunder Bay classic, and I got some pretty good ice cream. We hung out for a bit and I got to meet up with other friends that I met at FYIC 2018, Brianne and Benjie, and so it was a lot of fun catching up with people. Tomorrow is my last day in Thunder Bay, and I'm not too sure what the plan is yet, but we'll have to see how things go.

Lakehead: www.instagram.com/p/BjGy6cQlXQ7