Eight months ago, neither of us had ever heard of St. Joseph Island, and I'd never been north of Parry Sound, which is five hours' south. It's a huge, beautiful island with a population of about 2,000, which increases to about 6,000 in the summer.
There are three townships, two villages, and lots of amenities, even doctors, a dentist and a hairdresser. If you're desperate for traffic or malls, Sault Ste. Marie is about 45 minutes from the highway access. Add another twenty minutes and you can go to Michigan.
Our property is in the south west of the island, on the highway. Since we are almost as far away from the island access as you can get, there are few cars that go by. It takes us about twenty minutes to get OFF the island, going at 80 km per hour. Our little section of Northern Ontario is 100 acres, with about 1.5 cleared acres, so it is largely wild bush.
The house is made of Red Pine and is bigger than our house in Hamilton. The story behind the house is that about 1980 there were three friends, who bought adjoining 100 acre lots here. One of them went to British Columbia for a year to learn how to build log houses. When he came back, he and the other two built their houses, ours being the last one built by the fellow who went to B.C., and was his house. Pretty neat story.
So the house is not old, 36 years. Our previous house is about to hit 100 in a few years. I was concerned about the darkness inside -- I prefer light-coloured walls, but I'm getting used to the wood. I was also aware that we'd have to deal with the exteriour logs, that is, seal them. I didn't realize that I'd have to do that almost immediately, which I did. Since I'm of the shrimp variety, when my son, Malcolm, came to visit and work for a week, I nominated him to go up the ladder to reach the highest logs. We had to wrangle away the hugest, healthiest spiders in order to access the logs. Nice.
There were two things that worried me about coming up here -- mosquitoes and bears. We saw one young black bear, about five kilometers from here, crossing the highway. When he saw our car, he took off into the woods. We know there are others, and Dave has seen some scat, but we haven't seen actual bears on our property yet. Mosquitoes, we have. It's October 11th today and we still have the buggers. They love me. I can go out and they leave Dave alone and come after me. Malcolm had the same problem, so it's something about our skin, or smell, or freckly whiteness. Gak. So, by my calculations, we should have no mosquitoes from about November to May. Before we get the joys of having them back, though, we get several weeks of black flies. They supposedly bite chunks of skin off. Maybe I'll stay inside for six months. I'm sure it's not healthy to slather yourself in anti-bug products every day for six months.
Moving up here was my idea...
Angi