It's after 3:30 p.m. and most people who came for Saturday's opening of the Trans Canada Trail Pavilion have left Clergue Park.
Not Valerie Pringle.
No, the beloved Canadian broadcaster and Trans Canada Trail chair is still hanging out here, talking to some of the people who helped make this section of the national trail happen.
"Getting it to happen was a lot like a big long game of Whac-a-Mole," terminally perky Valerie is saying. "But now that it's here, hopefully keeping it will be as easy as pushing through plastic wrap," Pringle tells Donna Hilsinger from the Sault Trails Action Committee and Gayle Phillips from Saulteaux Voyageur Trail Club.
Our photo shows Pringle explaining the plastic-wrap push thing to Hilsinger.
"If someone tried to say, 'Oh, we want to put a condo up and your trail is going away,' now it becomes sacred. But it is a challenge getting people fired up to actually build trails," she said.
During an earlier interview with reporters, Pringle commented that she gets all the easy jobs.
It's groups like the Saulteaux Voyageur Trail Club, Trans Canada Trail, the City of Sault Ste. Marie and their volunteers who actually get the trails built and maintained, said Pringle.
"I just come to cut ribbons," she said with a laugh. "I'm the luckiest girl in the world."
As chair of the Trans Canada Trail, Pringle said she gets to as many events and openings as she can.
This suits her just fine.
"I was one of those people who saw the map in Maclean's magazine when they first started to talk about the Trans Canada Trail. When I saw that little red line I thought 'how fabulous is that!'"
She said she and her husband enjoy travelling on trails around the world, but Canada is their favourite.
"I love this country. I'm absolutely passionate about it and believe in it whole-heartedly."
Valerie Pringle Has Left the Building, a travel documentary airing on CTV, takes her to every corner of the globe, but Pringle told reporters tody that coming home is the best.
"The more you travel the more you do go 'wow' because it is such a spectacular country."
Pringle also talked about the people whose loved ones are named on the plaque on the wall of the new Trans Canada Trail pavilion in Clergue Park.
"People put names and donate metres often in the name of loved ones who have died," said Pringle. "I love for them to see their names their in perpetuity as part of a great national legacy project. And to be able to touch those names and think that they'll always be there and they built something great and everyone who uses this trail will think of them."
For just over an hour this afternoon, Pringle met and talked with people in Clergue Park.
Roberta LaRue was one of those people.
She told Pringle about her father, Nick Malone.
"He loved the outdoors, he loved to hunt and fish," LaRue said. "When we were young, many times he took my sisters and myself fishing and taught us how to catch the big ones. He was a true northerner, born in the Sault and raised in the west end."
LaRue said a friend of her father arranged to have his name inscribed on the plaque in memoriam and that it meant a lot to her family.
The pavilion on Sault Ste. Marie's waterfront recognizes more 800 donors.
It's one of 87 pavilions across Canada, displaying inscriptions of mor than 100,000 trail donors and supporters.
The Trans Canada Trail is volunteer-based.
When completed in 2017, will span 18,000 kilometres, link 800 communities and be the longest recreational trail in the world.
The next episode of Valerie Pringle Has Left the Building airs on CTV on October 1.
She also has a documentary, Rudeness, coming out on CBC on October 30.
"It's about rudeness, manners and civility and what's happened to our society," Pringle said.
In November or December a documentary she shot ths summer with a group of women on Mount Kilimanjaro this summer is expected to air on CBC's documentary channel.
Photos 15 to 25 in our gallery came to us from faithful SooToday.com reader Francis Lapointe.