Kenora 2013: Wasting No Time

Our "lodgings" in Kenora

When we woke up Saturday morning there was no trace of the bad weather that had plagued us over the second half of our drive. It was sunny and cool and we knew that we were going to be fishing before the clock hit double digits. Lana made us a pretty fantastic breakfast which we ate in the sun room overlooking the street, then we made a quick check of the weather and winds (sunny and calm, according to our sources) and bundled our gear into the car. I had been a little worried about getting my camera and lenses wet, so Lana came up with a Ziploc bag large enough to hold everything in it at once and still close properly. I tucked this precious cargo into a sports bag and off we all went to pick up the boat and (for Sarah and me) our fishing licences. At Sunset Baits, where we took care of the paperwork (and, of course, picked up our minnows), I bought a pair of FroggToggs waterproof pants—a steal at $18.99—and changed into them from the non-waterproof sweatpants I had been wearing. If I had known, as I discovered later on, that my baseball jacket was not even water resistant, I'd likely have bought the whole set. Live and learn, I guess. (Trust me: that jacket will be waterproofed by us very, very soon.) Once we were done at the bait shop we made a quick stop at the home of Lana's dad, Sam, to pick up the fishing gear and then we headed down to the Rec Centre parking lot to launch.

Kenora 2013: Shortest Day, Biggest Pay-Off

Kakabeka Falls

After a very restful night in Thunder Bay (followed by a delicious continental breakfast) we started out on the final leg of our journey west. It had rained overnight but had stopped long enough for us to load the car, although the air was cold and crisp and the sky dim. Almost as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot, however, the rain started up again and it was our nearly constant companion from there until about half an hour out of Kenora. As a result, our nearly compulsory stop at Kakabeka Falls was cut quite short: just long enough for us to take a few pictures from the viewing platform nearest to the parking lot and run for cover as the skies began to open up. In years past we have spent quite a bit of time at this gorgeous natural wonder, but this time we didn't even cross the bridge that you can see in the above picture. If I wasn't 100% certain we'd be back in the future this might have bothered me more; however, the single-digit temperature reading and the piercing rain washed any regrets right out of our heads.

Kenora 2013: The North Shore of Lake Superior

Sarah about to "test the waters"

Kayaks again, in a different light

The morning dawned dull and cool but dry. This last feature was a very rare one for us while camping, but especially while camping in Pancake Bay Park. The new air mattress had rewarded us for our struggles by bestowing upon us one of the best sleeps we had ever had in a tent together, helped along by the wolf song that started up just before we nodded off. We broke camp quite early, but were reluctant to leave the beauty of the park. We headed down to the beach and just breathed in the fresh air for a long while, checking to see if the clear waters of Lake Superior were any warmer than last night (they were not) and listening to the water lap gently at the sand. After an almost tragically short amount of time we left the beautiful vista and drove to the comfort station for showers. We left the park, keeping the vehicle permit to use for stops later in the day, and drove across the highway to the shops and gas station there, a must-visit on each of our trips to Pancake Bay. We enjoyed some free coffee and friendly service, purchasing a small bottle of blueberry syrup to bring to Kenora as a gift. The skies looked threatening as we pulled out of the station and headed for Thunder Bay, but we managed to avoid being rained on for much of the day. We munched on granola bars and fruit as we entered the spectacular Lake Superior Provincial Park.

Kenora 2013: The Road Trip Begins

The "quick-up" tent we use for travelling

I don't know why we don't make the journey more often than triennially. I truly don't. As a young lad I spent many summer days and nights in the bosom of the Laurentians in Quebec and I thought I would never experience a natural beauty more soul-lifting and breathtaking. I was wrong. I've travelled the breadth of this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific—missing only Newfoundland and the territories to this point—and I have never found any part of it that makes me feel the way the drive around the north shore of Lake Superior does, with the possible exception of our ultimate destination: the incomparable Lake of the Woods. If there were no other claims to our time, attention or pocketbook, I am absolutely certain we would take this trip a minimum of once per year. But then, I am also absolutely certain that if there were no other claims to my own time, attention or pocketbook, I would already be living in that region of the country permanently. But I am not, so I must take full advantage of the life-giving forces of the Near North whenever they present themselves to me. Here—and continuing over the next two weeks—is my account of our most recent Road Trip to Kenora.

The Next Ken Jennings?

"This....is.....Jeopardy!"

The online auditions for Jeopardy! are right around the corner and I have signed up once again this year, because apparently I am just a glutton for punishment. To clarify: I have qualified to be on the show three times in my life but have yet to appear on the air for whatever reasons the cosmos deems hilarious in each particular year. The most recent time also happened to be the first time the online test was offered, requiring Sarah and me to take a trip to New York City after I passed the cyberquiz. Previous to that, all the tests I had written were offered in Toronto and I was two-for-three on those. The very first one I ever wrote was in 1989 and I blew it, which was even harder to swallow because I could have written it in Los Angeles the year before while I was on vacation and, I later heard, the one I wrote and failed in Toronto was the exact same test, meaning I would have had two cracks at it. Let's clarify once again: if you "fail" a Jeopardy! test it only means you scored under 70% on it, which means you got more than 15 wrong out of 50 questions. To further expand on this: over the three tests I wrote in Toronto a grand total of eleven people scored highly enough to be allowed to stick around for a mock game; I was two of those eleven people. And I still haven't been on the show. Hell, yes, I'm a little bitter! I did win a hat on one of those occasions, though, by sitting in the chair with the masking tape stuck to the bottom. So I'm a little lucky, but just not lucky enough to be on the damn show. So far.

Haliburton in the Fall

Looking east from the Dorset Tower

View from the "Scenic Lookout" in Minden

Sarah's birthday is fast approaching—the middle of next month, actually—and she asked that an early "present" be a drive up north to see the fall colours, something we hadn't done—not really—in nearly seven years, since shortly after we moved into our current apartment. We set our sights on this weekend a while back; as it drew closer, though, the weather forecast began to look more and more contrary and we worried that we would not really get that far out of town after all. When this morning dawned bright and fresh, however, we decided to throw caution to the wind, 70% P.O.P. be damned, and let Babar whisk us away to the spectacular autumn carpet of the Haliburton Highlands. We made arrangements with our wonderful neighbour, Sophia, to come in and give Addie her dinner so we didn't need to rush back; then it was time for the obligatory fuel-ups—us at Tim Horton's, Babar at the Esso near the Parkway—and away we went. Every heartless directional aide we consulted—Google Maps, Nokia Maps, even our car's GPS—wanted us to travel west, up the 400, and come into Dorset (our main destination) from that direction; however, we were not to be swayed. We knew the purpose of our drive wasn't simply to get to the colours but rather to pass through them. We decided that the best way to do this was to drive east first and then head up Highway 35, which would take us through Minden and the Kawarthas before tiptoeing along the border of Muskoka and Haliburton counties. This is a beautiful drive on any day of the year; once the colours have begun to change it is positively breathtaking. We were not disappointed in our decision; in fact, had we gone the other way we would have missed the "Scenic Lookout" in Minden altogether. As you can see from these pictures, the colours were pretty impressive in this region, although we knew they were only going to get more spectacular as we approached Algonquin Park.

Sarah and Grumpy P take turns...

...posing in front of the fence by the bluffs

And then we completely ignored the fence...

...and took much better photos!

Awenda 2012 - Day Four and the Journey Home

Chippy bum!!

Sunday saw the end of the chippies (ha! see what I did there?) which is really an annual thing. They don't ever seem to come around on tear-down day no matter how many peanuts we have left for them. This year there was the additional matter of a thunderstorm that rolled through the area in the middle of the night (of course it would rain just before we took down our tents) which may have driven them underground for a while. In any event, the rains were long gone by the time we rolled off of our paper-thin "deflatable" mattress and got on with our day. There wasn't much direct sun on our campsite, but we took full advantage of the little we had and dried all the things that needed to be dried: fly, kitchen tent, clothes that had been on the line. By the time we left Awenda there wasn't a damp item in our collection, except every single piece of clothing we wore to take down the site. Man alive, was it hot on Monday morning. Not only did the rains not help the humidity/heat duo, they seemed to make it worse.

Just Trying to Make it to Friday

Another shooting today in Toronto. At least this shooter had the "decency" to only hit the one person. I guess that's an improvement.

And then there was the small matter of the machete attack about 100 yards from our car dealership. So, what: it's gotta be the heat, right? Right?

Sigh.

Our beautiful, annual site at Awenda

Well, if we make it to our car safely on Friday morning we're off to Awenda this weekend. We've camped there the last three years in a row, but usually in a large group that goes mid-month. This year that gang went to Presqu'ile and we just didn't want to go there, so we booked a week later on the same site we've had every year (pictured at right). Our friends the Ramendas will be joining us for most of the time we're up there and that will be a really nice treat for us. We're getting out of Toronto early Friday morning to beat the weekend traffic (which, in Toronto, starts around 11AM these past couple of years) and we're not coming back until Monday afternoon or evening, depending on the weather, for exactly the same reason. My kids are splitting the weekend cat-sitting duties for us, which we really appreciate.

Missing Kenora

A tile wall mosaic at the Kenora Skate Park

A friend of mine is currently on a solo bike trip from Toronto to Vancouver (and blogging about it); sort of a One Week without the health issues. She's in Saskatchewan right now, but the first part of her trip took her along the same route that Sarah and I follow when we drive to Kenora, a place I like to get to as often as possible. I didn't make it there last year for mainly financial reasons; those reasons persist and I won't be there this summer, either. I was dealing with this pretty well until I started following my friend's blog and seeing the pictures that she took between Toronto and Winnipeg. Now I'm sitting in the stinking heat of a Toronto summer that is suffocating in every possible meaning of the word, wishing with all my heart that I could instead be perched on a dock in Northern Ontario on the incomparable Lake of the Woods, watching the float planes take off and land, feeling the cool, clear air off the water and listening to the loons.

Hot Enough for Ya?

The sun was angry that day, my friends...

It's stupid hot in Toronto today. It was over 30C before 10AM and eventually reached 35C in the early afternoon, refusing to budge from that mark for several hours. If you didn't go outside, you likely still had a pretty good idea of how hot it was if you checked Twitter, Faceboook or any news sites, listened to the radio, watched local news, or just tried to look out of your window. I had to go out: we were out of beer. Had we been out of, say, food there's no way I would have gone outside. And when I did go out - brief as it was - I felt like I was asphyxiating, slowly. Sarah said it felt like she was "standing behind the hot exhaust of a car". Yes, it was that hot here. So I've decided to do something a little different with my blog today, because you know the old saying: "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it."

Well, I'm doing something about it. I'm going to tell you all about a trip to Minden, Ontario that Sarah and I took in February of 2007. In the winter. With snow and everything. I hope you enjoy it.

Another "Pleasant Valley" Sunday (and Friday and Saturday, too!)

Relaxing on the porch with coffee and the Globe and Mail

Yesterday I wrote about the wonderful Art Fayre in Dunvegan over the weekend; now it's time to tell the story of the rest of our road trip to the Ottawa Valley. It began on Friday morning, around 11AM, when we had finally finished packing and Tim's bag (he cat-sit for us) had been picked up and delivered to our apartment. We fueled up at Timmy's first, then we had to make a stop in Leaside to pick up some fireworks for a Solstice party on Saturday night (at the request of Sarah's mom). We swung back down to our neighbourhood to pick up Tim and drove him up to an interview for Co-op placement for this fall (it went very well) and then we were finally on the open road, headed for the Hawkesbury region. We had more time than we needed so we decided to take a more scenic route than simply Highways 401-416-17 to get there. Part of our scenic route included a jog down to the St. Lawrence along the Thousand Islands Parkway.

The Art Fayre "Report"

Jolly dancing letters

As I may have mentioned, oh....once or twice in previous posts, Sarah and I spent the weekend in the Ottawa Valley. The point of the trip was to visit her mom but the timing of the trip centred around Art Fayre, an annual event which took place in Dunvegan over the weekend. (For pictures of the wonderful art that was hung there, as well as profiles of the artists themselves, please take a look at the Art Fayre blog - which I also link to in the right-hand column of this blog - or their Facebook page.) These jolly letters on the lawn of the Glengarry Pioneer Museum welcomed visitors to this event; there was a lively (and welcomed) little breeze on Saturday when we attended and it had spun a couple of the letters around the opposite way. I think this added to the charm!

Art Fayre in Dunvegan...Full Report Tomorrow

Grumpy P and partner are away in the beautiful Ottawa River Valley right now. I hope to be back in time tonight to post a piece about the events of this weekend. In case I am not, please have a look at the Art Fayre blog and Facebook page for this event - there should be updates there. I'll be back as soon as I can with pictures and tales from Art Fayre!


If that isn't good enough for you, here is a video of a squirrel eating peanut butter from inside the jar. Enjoy!




****UPDATE Sunday, June 24, 10:50 PM****

After an exhausting weekend we arrived home late this evening far too tuckered out to do the Art Fayre any justice. I'll have a post up on Monday about the Art Fayre itself and another post on Tuesday relating how the rest of the trip went. Please come on back and check them out! Thanks!

Heading for the Ottawa Valley

Sunset on the Ottawa River, seen from Mom's home

It's Art Fayre time in Dunvegan, Ontario this weekend. (If you haven't checked out the Art Fayre blog or Facebook site please drop by and take a look.) Some very talented local artists will have their works on display at this annual exhibition and Sarah and I are really looking forward to being there. Today we're on the road, heading up to Sarah's mom's home in Lefaivre, near Hawkesbury. We haven't been up there since last August; we used to go a little more frequently but the addition of Addie to our family has made us, by necessity, less spontaneous. It requires some planning on our part if we're going to be away even overnight; this weekend my son, Tim, will be staying in our apartment and cat-sitting for us.

Harvard, 1982

The view from my friend's dorm room

It's Memorial Day today in the States (hope you're having a great day if you're celebrating it) and I've realized in thinking about Memorial Days and Victoria Days of yore that it was exactly 30 years ago this past week that I took my only trip to Boston to visit a friend who was finishing up at Harvard by the name of John Rose. 30 years ago today I was sitting in a repertory theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts watching the Bogie and Bacall classic, To Have and Have Not for the first time. My girlfriend, Jeanette, and I had just bought a brand-new Civic - my first car - and I had turned 21 only a week earlier. John was writing his finals around that time but he assured us we could crash in his dorm and it wouldn't get in his way (because he is a super-genius). New car, legal drinking age, free lodging: sign me up!

I loved this facade being kept alive

So sometime around twilight on Victoria Day, May 24, 1982, Jeanette, Stephe Yorke (whom you may remember from earlier blog posts on music and mothers) and I piled into the Civic and took off for the Mass 'Pike. J and I split the driving a little but I did the bulk of it as we drove through the night to Boston. We had allowed 10-11 hours for the trip, expecting to get there in time for an early breakfast with John; we made it in about 8 1/2 because I had quite a lead foot in my youth. If memory serves, we arrived in front of John's dorm about 4:30 in the morning and had to wake him up to let us in. I have heard the drive from Boston to Harvard across the Charles River is really quite pretty; we came and went in nearly total darkness so I really cannot offer any opinion on that. What I remember mostly is that we made it there without getting lost once; and that there was absolutely no place to park when we arrived that didn't cost about a month's salary per hour to use. Street parking overnight (which is when we arrived) was a no-go and apparently policed quite heavily, judging from the inordinate number of "Denver Boots" we saw on the cars around the dorms. (I had no idea that's what they were called until John told me, having never seen them before. They were everywhere in Boston in the spring of 1982.) I honestly have no idea where we ended up parking that night or the rest of the time we were there, but we managed to do it "boot-free" and without having to give up a kidney. We must have been pretty creative, I think.

First Road Trip of the Season

Rice Paper Butterfly

Today dawned sunny and warm so we hit the road mid-morning and headed west (after the obligatory fuel-up at Timmy's, of course). Sarah bought us two admissions for the Cambridge Butterfly Conservatory for $10 (normally $26) from Team Buy last week because she's wanted to go there (the Conservatory, not the website) for quite some time. (We've not been to any butterfly conservatories before, not even the one in Niagara. It wasn't particularly busy today so we were able to move about rather freely on the paths inside. It was, of course, quite humid where the butterflies were living; it must take a bit of getting used to for the staff members who work there. It smelled wonderful, though: very lush and alive. There were a lot of very sunny patches where some of the creatures had set up shop to "catch a few rays". It was, in fact, very bright overall; I rarely had to use a flash for these pictures.

Dora's Big Adventure

Well, the angst of yesterday has been washed away - for now, at least. I decided to take advantage of this opportunity to make a more light-hearted post on the blog, so I went searching through some old pictures for inspiration. I think I've found a good subject!

Two summers ago Sarah and I made our more-or-less semi-annual pilgrimage to Kenora, ON. We drove each way - which we prefer to do, because that drive is just so beautiful and it gives us some time alone together - and when we were about to leave to return to Toronto we discovered that our little niece, Samantha, had left her "Dora the Explorer" doll behind when she and her family returned to Pickering a day or two ahead of us. So we offered to bring it back with us, which gave me an idea for an homage to Amelie. I decided that I would take pictures of Dora visiting some landmarks on her way home and, since we couldn't return the doll for about a week, I would send an email each day to Sammy and her parents "from Dora" with a picture of where she was spending her time. This is how that turned out:

Dora and Husky the Muskie, Kenora

Dora and Maximillian Moose, Dryden

Itchin' To Travel

The Blue Jays are playing tonight down by the lake with the Dome open - the second-earliest date this has happened in any season since they moved there in 1989. (For trivia nuts - like me - the earliest was April 16, 2002. Thanks to @ShiDavidi for the information.) This is getting me excited for the prospect of getting out of town this spring and summer for camping, day trips, visits to see Sarah's mom in the Ottawa Valley and, of course, whatever long road trip we decide on (most likely it will be Kenora as usual, which is fine with me).

This, in turn, caused me to look back through some pictures I had taken on these trips over the past few years (at least the years I owned a digital camera!) and I am going to post a couple of my favourites here. Most (except the last two) may be found on my Flickr photostream in case you're not "satisfied" with the samples here.

"What are you lookin' at?"