Thunder Bay, Canada
Thunder Bay-cation From Reality
"Where the Sleeping Giant Does All the Napping"
Official Coat of Arms
A shield bisected down the middle representing the eternal East End versus West End rivalry, flanked by two grain elevators rusting nobly in the sun. Above, a sleeping giant snores through a Canadian Tire flag planted at half-mast, with the motto 'Nearly Everywhere Else Is Further' scrolled beneath in frost-bitten script.
TripAdvisor Review
★★★☆☆ 3/5
"Drove eighteen hours from Toronto expecting a quaint lakeside town and got a very long strip of highway with a Canadian Tire every few kilometres. The Sleeping Giant rock formation is genuinely stunning, and the persian (the pastry, not the rug) at the local bakeries is a revelation, but I was informed by three separate locals that the east side and west side of town have been feuding since amalgamation in the 70s. Winters apparently arrive in September and leave reluctantly in May. Still, the fishing and the grain elevators have a weird industrial beauty to them."— Barb Fenwick, Kenora, Ontario
Property Listing
Charming lakeside city offering unparalleled proximity to Lake Superior, a dramatic sleeping giant view included at no extra cost, and a commute that's mostly just deciding which side of the amalgamated city you'll pretend not to have opinions about! Bonus: eight months of winter builds character, and the other four are absolutely gorgeous.
Twinned With
Anchorage — Both cities are enormous, cold, gorgeous, and roughly a thousand kilometres from the nearest place anyone's heard of.
Supporting Evidence
Thunder Bay has the highest per-capita number of Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire stores in Canada, and it also holds the unfortunate title of Canada's 'murder capital' in some crime-rate rankings, a stat locals will bring up before you can.