Western Ontario

You don't have to drive through western Ontario to get from Winnipeg to southern Minnesota, but it helped satisfy my need for geographic variety and completeness.

About 30 miles east of Winnipeg - near Steinbach - the flat, largely treeless prairies end (we're almost 900 miles from the Rockies) and the Canadian Shield begins.  The land starts to rise and the cultivated fields turn to forest. It's another few tens of miles before you begin to see bedrock along the roadside.  And then it's hills and forest and ancient rocks all the way east - although this trip we only went as far as Thunder Bay.

Somewhere between Dryden and Thunder Bay we crossed into the eastern time zone and a little farther on we left the Hudson Bay watershed and entered the St. Lawrence drainage.  I love crossing these continent-scale divides. The so-called Great Divide (the Rocky Mountain crest which divides east and west flowing rivers) is just the most prominent continental divide in North America, but there are many others.  Like this one in Ontario.  Later this trip M and I drove west past a Continental Divide sign on I-94 in North Dakota between Valley City (Sheyenne River - Red River - Nelson River - Hudson Bay) and Jamestown (James River - Missouri - Mississippi - Gulf of Mexico).

Another piece of geographic trivia. When you drive across Canada, you enter Ontario west of Minneapolis and Des Moines.  You leave it at the same longitude as New York City.  That's one wide province!