The annual pilgrimage

This is the time of year we like to head north for a few days.

We camp on the north shore of Lake Superior, along the Schrieber - Marathon stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway. We have a campsite where we can see the lake and the CPR line that cuts overhead along the steep Canadian Shield cliffs.

This is an area that always knocks you out with it's natural beauty. The rocks, the trees, that great inland sea. For me it always draws me into history as well.

The history of the CPR for example.

It's everywhere up here. In fact, it's everywhere all over the country.

The Scottish investors who were behind the CPR got $25 million cash and a land grant of 25 million acres for building the railway.

The history of the CPR is in flux again. Some New York hedge fund manager figures he can milk a few billion out of the old cow. He's just parachuted an American CEO in after winning a proxy battle to get rid of the old management.

Nothing new in that. After the first year of construction of the CPR, the owners turfed out their senior management and brought in an American. He made himself rich building that railway.

That railway and the subsidiaries that have been spun off from it have made many people rich over the past 130 years, so maybe there's enough juice left for this latest crew of paper-shufflers.

None of which takes away from the achievement of those laborers and blacksmiths and miners and carpenters and engineers and surveyors who actually made that rock cut we're looking at, and put the tracks up there.

But don't get me started... I come here to get away from thinking.