It’s been a while since our last update, but we’re still here and better than ever!

We opened on April 1st this year for our second season as the new proprietors of The Coach House Motel, here at the Top of Lake Superior. Our 2006 season wasn’t anything for the record books, but it was good enough where we can safely say now that we’ll be here for a while. Yes, we’ll continue making improvements and renovating rooms and facilities to eventually turn The Coach House Motel into much more than a roadside motel. Someday very soon we may have to change the name to something more like; The Coach House Inn, or The Coach House Resort.

This year we are continuing with repairing and re-facing the exterior by completing the old sections of the roof so everything on top will be new and secure. We will soon be replacing all the windows in the dining room, kitchen and office. Those were pretty bad and obstructed the lovely view we have over Jackfish Lake and the forested hills that surround us here in this little piece of paradise just a stone’s throw away from the big lake.

We have already begun a total gutting and re-building of two of the units down on the end. We have taken a business improvement loan so we can complete those in the next month or two, so if you’re reading this and want to come back up this year, ask about those when you call for reservations.

Oh yes, we have more trails this year also. It took us most of the season last year to find our way and stop getting lost in our own backyard, but we’ve got our bearings now. We’ll be putting up small signs to point the way at forks in the trails so you won’t get lost either.

However, everything hasn’t been all work and no play up here this past year. We had some wonderful guests stay with us. We have been mentioned in the May 2007 issue of Canoe & Kayak Magazine. Patti and I remember that particular visit from those guys who did their canoe trip all the way around the Steel River Circle Route and wrote a wonderful article about their experience. We happen to be the un-official visitor center for that new Ontario Provincial Park and it is only five miles away. And if you want to come up and try that challenge in your Kayak or Canoe, we’ll help you get your vehicles situated where you expect to come out, so you don’t have a long walk back to civilization, how’s that?

Another big surprise for lots of our visitors last year (ourselves included because we are still new up here), was the weather. We had a long, dry summer and fall last year. If we had lawns to worry about, they wouldn’t have looked very nice, but lawns are unimportant around these parts. The nice part of that long dry spell was that we had so many sunny days that even we were getting tired of being sun-burnt all the time. And the bugs were pretty much gone by July 1st. In conclusion, all you south of the border types… people in Ontario do not live in igloos. In fact, we did a lot of swimming in Jackfish Lake and spent a lot of pleasant evenings waiting until almost midnight for the sky to get dark enough to see the stars come out. And we did get to see several beautiful displays of the legendary “Northern Lights”. If you haven’t seen that in your life, you have no idea what you are missing.

The only bad part of this strange weather (can anyone say; ‘Global Warming’?) is that there was no snow on the ground here until mid-January! You got that right and without a thick blanket of snow to provide insulation, water pipes are exposed and vulnerable. We know that all too well now and we have a completely new water supply and treatment system this year.

And so, we are open for business again and looking forward to sharing our experience of our 2nd careers with all of our new friends here at The Coach House Motel.
                           
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