If any of your
friends or colleagues asked you one day what your favourite place to vacation
is, what would you say? Would you know
instantly which place you want to vacation in the most? Would it matter how you traveled there, who
you went with or when you decided to go there?
These are the questions that everyone asks themselves when they have
just one or two weeks to spend somewhere special. I am certainly no exception. I’ve asked myself these questions many
times. About seven years ago, I finally found
my ideal place.
For me, that
place is Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (a.k.a. the “Soo”, or SSM). It’s situated in northern
Ontario between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, on the St. Mary’s River. To me, the “Soo” is a very special place
because of the way I feel while I’m travelling there, staying at Days Inn and
travelling home later on. Friends or
colleagues of mine ask me why I like the “Soo” so much and my reply is that it
feels the way I think Heaven would feel if I were there. And, they look at me like I’m crazy (that’s
nothing new, mind you!) because they really don’t understand the appeal of the
“Soo” to me.
You’d have to
have visited this place to know what “Heaven” really means to me.
There’s so much that the “Soo” has to offer
its visitors in the summertime. There is
the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, a national historic site of Canada; there is the Agawa
Canyon Tour Train Holiday Package, a 2-night train package that is
offered to various hotels for their guests; and, there are the “Soo” Locks Boat
Tours that will take you right through the boat lock system. There are also some very nice restaurants,
malls, movie theatres and historic sites; pretty much anything you want to do
or see is available. My tastes are
relatively simple, yet I have an adventurous spirit and when that spirit is
active, I like to do different things on my vacation – things that I don’t
normally do in my regular daily life – mostly because I want to feel like my
life is now richer as a result, but also because I don’t always have the time
to do different things. To me, that’s
what vacations are really all about – doing the things that you don’t have the
time for normally. I’d like to tell you
about a few of the various tourist attractions to begin with.
The
Sault Ste. Marie Canal:
Discover
technology over 100 years old that still operates the historic lock complex
near downtown Sault Ste. Marie. You can
do the following:
- Visit
the Powerhouse; in 1895, power for the world’s first electrically operated
lock was produced here.
- Learn
how the Emergency Swing Dam saved the day in 1909.
- Visit
the Sault Ste. Marie Canal year round.
- Visit
the Visitor Centre near the Canal.
- Research
the library resources available on site.
- View
the lock’s operation – it is open for pleasure craft from mid-May to
mid-October.
- Do
picnicking and bird-watching.
- Have
ready access to washrooms and parking.
- And,
there is a phone and fax number, and an email and web site address for
your convenience.
The
Agawa Canyon Tour Train Holiday
Package:
The Agawa Canyon Tour Train Holiday Package
includes 2 nights’ hotel accommodation, 1 Agawa
Train ticket, 2 continental breakfasts, 1 OLG Casino SSM Package and 1
Attractions Passbook. From June 7th to
September 9th, the price (including tax) for adults is $203 and the
price for seniors is $195. From
September 10th to October 10th, the price goes up: for adults and seniors, the price is $236. During this time, it is considered a “winter”
train tour. I suppose that the packages
are designed mostly for summertime visitors, like me.
I finally booked
myself to go on this train tour in August 2012 and it was truly magnificent! It was a one-day tour that took about seven
to eight hours to complete from start to finish. I was already booked at Days Inn for five
nights, two nights of which would have been included in the 2-night package. For approximately $180 CDN (not including
tax), I got a wonderful opportunity to go on this train tour that traveled up
north through the wild bush of northern Ontario for about three hours one-way,
stopped at a beautiful park and river at the end of the tour for about an hour
and a half and then returned its passengers back to Sault Ste. Marie in another
three hours. We had breakfast on the
train and snacks and drinks whenever we wanted.
I met some very nice people on this trip, as I always seem to do when
travelling, and we chatted about the many beautiful lakes and cottages and
trees and rock and the Agawa canyon itself.
It was breath-takingly beautiful and I’ll never forget it. I took lots of photos and later, made a photo
DVD for myself out of them.
My
Stay at Days Inn:
At Days Inn,
where I usually stay, everything is at my fingertips. Days Inn is a full-service hotel located only
one block away from the Agawa Canyon
Train Station. Days Inn is located
downtown, across from the Station Mall Shopping Centre and the new Essar Centre
Sports Complex and only two blocks from Casino Sault Ste. Marie for those who
like to gamble.
Days Inn
features a large indoor pool, sauna and workout room, as well as, complementary
wireless high-speed Internet access (a big selling point with me!) and a front
lobby workstation available if you don’t have your own portable computer with
you. The hotel also features outdoor
balconies with most rooms and an onsite restaurant and lounge. When I stayed at Days Inn last summer (August
2011), I had direct access to the lovely little grassy courtyard in the back
where there were some picnic tables to sit down at where I could read a book and/or
eat something. This feature made it seem
more like a house to me and less like a hotel room. In any event, an outdoor balcony is always
nice to have.
I also do a
little sight-seeing and I always take several photographs with my digital
camera. This year, I had some new photos
of myself taken in a local photo kiosk at the mall because I didn’t have any
good pictures of myself at home; the pictures from the photo kiosk turned out
surprisingly good and so, I wanted to display them on my author web site (www.anneshier.com), on my Facebook Wall
page, and on my personal Google page.
These lovely pictures should help improve my profile’s appearance quite
a bit and my public image as a new author.
The author photos I took here are going to be used on my next book cover
– they are that good.
I also like to
use my laptop computer as a multi-media centre.
I can watch DVD movies if there’s nothing much on TV; I can listen to
music though I usually use my portable CD player for that, and I can play
electronic games of all sorts (usually, Solitaire or Jeopardy!). For me, there is never a dull moment while I
have my computer on vacation! Whoever
said that travelling alone is dull has not vacationed in the “Soo” yet, nor
have they had access to a computer.
What I like to
do most of all though on my summer vacation at Days Inn in the “Soo” is to
write my short stories, or at least plan what I’m going to write. This year, however, I decided to just spend
time polishing up some short stories that I had already written. I did this because I was in no rush to get a
full book of stories ready for publication yet.
You see, I’d just published a book of 35 short stories in March 2011 called
“My Short Stories (Book One)” and it seemed to me that I should be giving my
first book a chance to succeed in the North American marketplace before
attempting to publish another book. In
my mind, that process might very well take anywhere from two to five
years. Canadians and Americans
everywhere had to be allowed the time and opportunity to read my short stories,
decide which ones they liked best and why, and then talk to other people (their
friends and colleagues) about their favourites.
Once that’s happened, I can then concentrate on publishing and promoting
another book.
One thing is for
sure – I love writing short stories and I plan on spending time doing this
activity a lot more from now on. So,
even though I am a full-time high school teacher who has taught mostly
computer-related subjects and career studies at my home school in Scarborough,
Ontario, I’ve also developed a deep love for creative writing. I love to write about people and
relationships, life and death, and various life-related issues. If people like my stories, it’s probably
because they can identify with a character somewhere in one of my stories and
the story makes sense to them; at least, I hope so. Only time will tell how successful I’ll be.
Travelling alone
up to the “Soo” is extremely pleasant. I
take my CD player and iPod with me and listen to music on the bus. The bus has its regular stops along the
way. The distance to travel up there is
about 900 km (409 miles) northwest of Toronto, so we stop three times along the
way. I invariably meet someone on the
bus to talk to and that helps to pass the time, as well. The whole trip takes about eleven hours,
including all rest stops, but it doesn’t seem all that long to me. On the way home, the same trip, which I did
at night this time (on the “red eye” bus), took maybe the same amount of time,
but it was much quieter and there weren’t quite as many people on the bus after
our Sudbury stop. It was a very relaxing
trip, however, both going up and coming back and I plan to do this trip again
many more times in the future. It really
is lovely visiting the “Soo” in the summertime.
That’s why I call it “My Heavenly Place”.
In the year 2012,
I was staying at Days Inn as I always did. I believe it was my sixth visit here. However,
the hotel was now undergoing major renovations.
I was living on a live construction site: talk about strange vacations! I asked why this was happening now. No one working at the hotel had told me at
the time I’d made my reservation that such things were happening. The hotel personnel told me that Days Inn had
recently been bought out by Holiday Inn Express. Thus, its name was to be changed. I surmised and mentioned to them that I
thought that meant the prices would also go up.
The hotel personnel, however, denied this fact, but they were wrong. Apparently, the new hotel would include a hot
breakfast with their daily rate and had built a new breakfast room with this in
mind. The individual guest rooms had
already been renovated, so the main changes were currently taking place in the
lobby, hallways, stairwells and breakfast room areas. Still, it was aggravating to have to spend my
2012 summer vacation in this environment, among construction personnel and
their equipment. Oh well, this year, 2014,
I booked myself into Holiday Inn Express for the first time, and, though it is
more expensive, it should also be just as nice, if not nicer. I’ll never change my mind about the “Soo” – I
expect that this place will always be “My Heavenly Place”.
copyright 2014, Anne Shier. All rights reserved.
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