Thunder Bay is the end of the line for the Ontario shore of Lake Superior, a port city of just under a hundred thousand people tucked against a huge bay with the long, flat shape of Sleeping Giant rising across the water. That peninsula, a cluster of cliffs and ridges, gives the city's skyline a nearly mythic profile, and the Ojibwe story says it is Nanabijou, the spirit of the deep sea, turned to stone. The name of the city comes from the bay, and the weather justifies it: storms off the lake can be sudden and loud.
For more than a century Thunder Bay was the point where the grain of the Canadian prairies met the ships. The big concrete elevators along the waterfront once loaded vast amounts of wheat for export through the Great Lakes, and the city's twin origins, in Fort William, which began as a fur-trade post of the North West Company, and Port Arthur, which grew as a railway terminus, still show in its two distinct downtowns. Old Fort William, a reconstruction of the fur-trade depot, is open in summer with costumed interpreters.
The ride along the north shore, from Sault Ste. Marie on Highway 17, is the reason to arrive here, and it is a fine one, mostly empty and mostly wooded, with the lake appearing and disappearing through the spruce. By the time you reach Thunder Bay you will have covered something like seven hundred kilometres of road with few towns, so the sight of a large city with a proper supermarket is a relief. Fuel, repairs, restaurants and motels are all easy here, which makes it the obvious place to rest.
The weather is the main uncertainty. Lake Superior makes its own climate, and fog, cold winds and sudden rain are normal even in summer, with the cold water chilling the air along the shore. Pack warm layers, and expect mosquitoes and black flies in early summer. The cliffs of Kakabeka Falls, a short ride west, are worth the stop, with a thundering waterfall sometimes called the Niagara of the North.
Try a Persian, a local pastry covered with pink icing, a Thunder Bay peculiarity that people take surprisingly seriously.