Today is a driving day. We wanted to put about 500 km in today and wound up going 700 km instead. More about the that in a moment.

We were driving through amethyst country straight out of the campsite so in the morning we decided to go to one of the amethyst mines. We chose Amethyst Mine Panorama. The tour of the mine only took about 10 minutes but we learned a lot. I didn't know how amethyst is mined or created in the earth. It is actually a surface mine and not something you can walk into.

After the tour, there is an area where all the amethyst the mine isn't using is collected. It looks like a rock gravel bed but with amethyst. You could pick as much as you want and buy it by the pound. I picked about 3 1/4 pounds of amethyst.

After that we got on the road. And we drove and drove and drove. For the Canadians who've done this drive you understand it. For the Americans, you might get a kick out of the fact that we drove through Wawa.

I had mentioned that we were only looking to go about 500 km. Well that would have had us actually stop in Wawa. We didn't. We didn't even pick up gas there which we should have. There is nothing between there and Sault Ste. Marie. Not even cell phone service. We were definitely getting nervous. We hadn't wanted to go that far. Our original intention was to go halfway to Sudbury, stop for the night and then continue on. But there was no place to stop. There was no gas stations. We had to keep going. Add in lots of construction on the roads slowing things down and one major accident, and it made for a very long drive.

We're glad we did though. We got to Sault Ste. Marie much later in the evening than we had anticipated but with plenty of gas to spare so we really didn't need to be as nervous as we were. We had a great dinner at the Voyager right outside of town and spent the night at a Holiday Inn Express. After all that driving, it turns out that we had to do more. The roads are one way here and there is construction on 3 sides of our hotel. We drove around and around and finally managed to get into the hotel parking lot by driving through the mall parking lot.

Tomorrow starts another adventure.