July 18 to July 24, 2016—Flight out of Canada
This week was a series of long drives and short stays. We had an appointment in Ann Arbor and a lot of ground to cover to get there in time. First was a fiasco in Quebec—I had directions to a campground that sounded good, just north of the city, but had not made a reservation. When we got there they had a site to rent but didn’t allow pets. They gave us a number for a place that allowed pets but had no vacancies. That place suggested another campground which allowed pets, had vacancy, but that’s as far as my French and their English went and I couldn’t understand their directions. We did eventually find it—a strange rv park filled almost entirely with year-round quebecois residents. They had their trailers tricked out with lights and statuary, everyone seemed to have a golf cart, also tricked out, and the evening air was filled with the scent of lighter fluid. At sunset the owner of the campground, Jack, drove a golfcart through his domain with another man in the passenger seat playing various tunes on a flugelhorn, including The Lonely Bull—an endearing tradition. I heard thunder at 6 am the next morning and we beat a hasty retreat out of there just ahead of a downpour. Found a nice old campground four hours south, run by a pretty French girl. When she opened the door to the campground office the strong wind blew her dress up just about over her head—I saw England, I saw France. The camp had a nice pool, a washing machine, a billiard table, and we had a relaxing stay for one day.
Charleston Lake Provincial Park was next, in the country. We stayed three days and it was a great place. Many hiking trails, each with a theme and a little booklet explaining things of interest. There was a geology trail that explained the unusual land forms of the area, a tree trail and a wildlife trail. The park was located in a transition zone in many different ways—the northernmost stand of red cedars and hemlocks, the easternmost habitat of some flowering plants, and one of the only places where the sandstone layer on top of the Canadian shield is intact and exposed, making for noteworthy geological formations. I liked this park a lot.
We had been without internet connection at this point for almost a week, gaining access for a few minutes at this restaurant.
We declined to dine there but bought enough odds and ends to justify poaching their wi-fi for a while.
A Toronto city park I had reserved for one night. A Toronto native I had talked to at Charleston Lake told me this park was in a rough neighborhood right in Toronto. I was disappointed to find that it was a normal park far-removed from the city. I had looked forward to an inner-city campground.
Then we stayed three nights in a marina campground on Lake Erie. I booked this place over the phone without knowing anything about it; they did not have a website and I had been avoiding places without websites. It turned out to be a really pleasant place—a shady, slightly elevated spot that caught a nice breeze all day and night. The little town of Port Burwell was a short walk away and we went into each night for a drink or an ice cream. The owner of a restaurant took a fancy to us and bought us drinks at the end of each evening after he closed the restaurant at 8PM. The whole town shut down then. It was one of those towns that used to see a lot of summer business from people coming to the lake but time has passed it by and half the town is shuttered or for sale as vacationers seek some higher thrill. The restaurateur who befriended us was loopy, with ideas about who runs the world and who ought to, an odd obsession with Churchill’s son having been captured by the Germans in WWII, and a disturbing fascination with the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi , but he laughed at my jokes and bought the drinks, so I didn’t mind if he was a little batshit. He was the only Canadian we met who used the interjection “eh?” with great frequency, at the ends of sentences, eh.
Crossed back into the good old USA over the Ambassador Bridge at Windsor/Detroit. Trailers like ours are diverted into a separate area with tractor trailers and the inspection went fairly easily. I know better than to try and make a joke during a border interrogation in these perilous times but it seems to me that the interrogators could lighten up a bit, make a fella feel welcome back to the land of his birth after such a long absence. Took a short drive through Detroit before heading to Ann Arbor; nothing like it in Canada, or probably the US for that matter..
Like I said, the week was something of a forced march through an increasingly hotter and more humid environment.