For those of you who’ve not been following our progress, Patti and I recently bought The Coach House Motel on Trans-Canada Highway 17 at Jackfish Lake just east of Terrace Bay.  We moved up here in the middle of January to the north shore of Lake Superior from the Chicago area for a variety of reasons, and although it has been an awful lot of work, we haven’t lost faith that what we want to do here is the right thing for us.

We arrived in the middle of a snowstorm and the moving van got stuck in the deep snow, but we managed to get all of our household goods stowed away in the hibernating motel that we now call home.

This has always been a seasonal business. It was built during the very early 1960’s and gradually enlarged into the 14 unit motel with a private dining room that it is now. It is our intention to continue operating The Coach House Motel as a seasonal business because quite frankly, there aren’t a lot of tourists coming through here in the “off-season”.

The dining room had not been operated for some time by the Kneipps when we first stayed here and contracted to purchase the property last September.  We determined that this would be the first goal we wished to achieve in our efforts to renovate and restore The Coach House Motel to its former glory.  Just like the old coach houses of Europe, lodging and dining just naturally make a long journey easier to take.

While the winter snow prevented us from starting any real work outside during January and February, we managed to get the new office, dining room and kitchen renovated to our satisfaction.  We still managed to find time to get out and walk the grounds even though there was knee and hip-deep snow in most areas on the property.  Silly city-folk – no snow-shoes!

Everyone here tells us that this was a mild winter that just past.  Having come from the Chicago area, the winter was easier for us in one significant way in that we didn’t have to commute to our jobs away from home.  That certainly doesn’t mean we didn’t work this past winter – we did. Yet, it didn’t seem so bad because we have this dream of making The Coach House Motel legendary for not just its scenic location and unique appearance, but for dining and outdoor possibilities, too.

We have been trying to get pictures up on our web-site, but alas, all of them so far have been of deep snow and bare trees.  The green forest and deep blue waters are just now here!

So, it is now May and the unusually warm and sunny months of March and April have left the two of us well-exercised and well-tanned. The weather has been so much nicer than we expected it to be when we started this project, but we’ll take it.

In the future, it would be nice to see tourists coming up to see how beautiful this area is during every season. There is a popular misconception that the best time to go to the great lakes is as soon as school gets out for the summer because any other time and it has to be like the Arctic, right?  Wrong!  My personal favorite month on the great lakes is September, but we’ll cover the relative advantages of every month as they come.

For now, suffice it to say that Canadian weather is not really the way the comedians joke about it being. One thing we are looking forward to is the much more pleasant summers we’ll be experiencing here from now on, as opposed to the hot and humid summers we’ve accepted as normal back in Palatine, Illinois.

So what is it actually like up here right now in the first week of May? Well, the leaves are just now starting to break out of the tree buds. The snow is all gone and the fish are spawning nearby. The walleyes are protected at this time of the year until they’ve finished spawning, but sometime by the end of May … it’ll be time to get the boat out and go fishin’!
                           
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