Soo Locks

7-24-16

Sault St Marie is home to the busiest locks in the world. There is a 21 foot drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, so a lock system was designed to negotiate this drop. Every day and night, huge freighters, tug boats, and barges use these locks. I didn't quite understand how they worked until I saw them in action.

Unfortunately, we needed to go back to the American side to see the big ships use the locks, so getting back over the border took a while. Luckily, we arrived when a big ship was passing through because there wasn't going to be much action for several hours afterwards. The engineering of the locks is pretty impressive. We got to see them lift a gigantic ship up the 21 ft to Lake Superior just by using water and it's natural flow. After, we checked out a small visitor's center.

The US border patrol told us about the "baby locks" on the Canadian side, so we checked them out after we saw the big ship pass through. It was actually really great that we got to see the smaller locks because we were able to see up close how they worked. We were walk across the gates and really look closer at how the water flowed in and out when a tour boat went through it.

When we were at the baby locks, Maya also got pretty excited because she got a beautiful picture of a cedar waxwing. It only seemed right to make sure it got on the blog.

Seeing the locks took a while (because of the borders) so we didn't get on the road until 12:30 pm and we needed to get all the was to Ottawa, ON for the night which is an 8:30 hrs of driving. It was a big push, but we were really good in the car - audio books help. The drive from Sault Ste Marie to Ottawa felt kind of remote rather than on the Trans Canada Highway. Since it was our 2nd to last day, we talked a lot about the trip with questions like "what was your proudest moment, most difficult moment, most entertaining moment, etc." All of our answers were different which is interesting that we all have had different experiences on the same trip. We got to our destination at 10:30 pm, so we were pretty tired - another full day.