Waterfalls & Porcupine Quills

Wiarton, ON, CA – Meaford, ON, CA

I guess maybe we’re getting the hang of this bike touring thing. We get up, we pack up the tent, we find a coffee shop, post our blog, and we ride and see. Then, once we reach our destination for the day we hit a grocery store, head to our campsite, set up camp and make dinner, plan the next day, go to bed and read a bit, then repeat.

It’s a pretty nice life, really.

Throw in some great conversations with nice people and a few adventures along the way and you have a routine worth repeating.

The bikes are a pretty good conversation starter – and the further we get from home the better they work for starting a good dialogue.

“You started in Wisconsin? That’s crazy!” is a pretty typical response these days.

And then we talk about our route, their biking experiences, their travel tips, where they’re from – or about any other topic.

Today’s journey started in Wiarton – a nice little town on Colpoy Bay on the Georgian Bay side of Lake Huron. It was a cold and wet start. It didn’t rain, but there was a ton of dew and condensation last night. Not the greatest way to wake up – but nothing a hot cup of coffee or tea can’t solve – combined with a little bit of hanging things out to dry once the sun came up a bit.

One of the things we’ve observed is that there doesn’t seem to be a huge Walmart Effect in Canada. Downtowns still seem to be downtowns – with coffee shops and grocery stores and restaurants. I mean, every town seems to have its Tim Horton’s – but that seems to be the one sin that Canadians afford themselves. It’s hard to blame them. Tim Horton’s makes a mean cruller – my personal favorite donut and one that is ordinarily difficult to find.

Now that we’re getting a little closer to Toronto there seems to be more people and more towns. Nature is great, of course, but it’s nice to have frequent pit stops to look forward to.

Our first stop today was in Owen Sound – another really nice town. Here’s the other interesting thing about Canadian towns. Even when they’re pretty far from population centers – or obvious economic drivers – they seem pretty nice. Lots of well-maintained homes, most of them with a big Canada maple leaf in the window. There seems to be a lot of Canadian pride and it seems like they are a little less divided than we seem to be in the U.S. right now.

Part of that is the flag, I guess. These days in the U.S. if you have a U.S. flag up I guess that implies that you are a Trumper. Kind of sad, really. We have our problems, but I’m still proud of our democracy and how we try to do better – even if we screw up a lot. I kind of resent the fact that one faction seems to have co-opted the flag for themselves.

I don’t have the impression that there is an analogue to this co-opting in Canada. People seem to just like it here. (Not that we haven’t seen a little craziness – like the “Rights, Freedom – Trudeau Must Go” sign we saw along the trail – but it seems pretty isolated.) And what’s not to like? Amazing natural beauty. Nice people, who seem happy. Maybe I’m dreaming on all of this, but it seems like there are not as many people on the extremes. I don’t mean politically; I mean rich and poor. We haven’t seen homeless encampments and, while we have seen a lot of nice homes, I don’t feel like we have seen a lot of tremendous wealth. No gated communities, giant yachts or ostentatious wealth. But we have a small sample size – and maybe Toronto will prove much different.

Anyway, we didn’t stop long in Owen Sound. I bought lunch to go at Minh’s – a Vietnamese place that seemed pretty authentic – at least based on the fact that the host who sold me my meal couldn’t speak any English.

We headed up – and I mean up – to Inglis Falls. Diana’s Wahoo – the one that warns us when we are going up what it considers a big climb – did it’s little din-din-ding three times on the way to the falls. It being lunchtime, and me saving my lunch until we got to the falls, meant that I was struggling pretty badly on the way up.

But totally worth it. See pictures. A REALLY nice falls. Not something Diana and I do a ton of on these trips. Usually we agree that the falls sound nice, but we’d rather not bike the extra mileage to get there. Maybe that will change after today.

Beautiful falls. Met some fantastic Canadians – Carolyn and Nikki – from down toward Port Huron, which is kind of getting closer to Detroit. For those of you, like me, who find the geography of “southen” Ontario confusing – somehow Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Detroit, and Lake Huron are all pretty close to each other . . .

And then the roads after the falls – which we were only on because we went to the falls – were amazing. Quiet, basically no traffic. Bucolic scenes with big expansive and picturesque farms that look like what farms are supposed to look like in our heads, surrounded by not quite mountains but rolling hills that make for amazing valleys and great backdrops. We agreed it was some of the best riding we have ever done.

Our own kind of funny moment of the day involved a porcupine. A pretty dead porcupine. Over the past few years I’ve been reading a fair number of Larry McMurtry books. He wrote Lonesome Dove, which is my favorite. Anyway, in a lot of Larry McMurtry books they are wandering around in the old West and there is talk about how much various people valued porcupine quills in those days.

I think that idea has been kind of percolating in my head for the past two weeks. Because we have seen a lot of dead porcupines along the roads – especially in the U.P. Well, finally yesterday after we saw a dead porcupine I realized that I wanted to harvest some porcupine quills. By the time I realized this it was too late – we had already passed the dead porcupine that helped crystallize the idea in my head – and then we never saw anymore yesterday. But today when I saw another dead porcupine I jumped at the chance.

Sadly, this porcupine was – in the immortal words of Miracle Max in the Princess Bride – “all the way dead” – meaning, for Miracle Max, that the only thing left to do was go through the pockets looking for loose change.

I would rather have harvested from a more reputable – not-so-dead – dead porcupine – but beggars can’t be choosers. I put on my do-everything gloves and plucked a few quills. I still have them and plan on looking up to see what cool things you can do with them once we reach Toronto. See Diana’s picture of the dead porcupine and video of me removing a few.

Eventually we made it to Meaford – another Georgian Bay town (Georgian Bay is officially part of Lake Huron but I guess Lake Huron-ites view Georgian Bay quite differently from the rest of the lake because it is deeper and colder. Which, from our Lake Superior perspective is funny – because it’s like bath water compared to Gitchee Gumee). We’re in a great campground on the beach, had fajitas for dinner (and they actually had a fire grate for the first time since Wisconsin – small miracles!), and then Diana made her now famous baked apples for dessert. Kind of funny – we weren’t sure we had any apples left – turns out that there were six stow-aways in various parts of our baggage. No wonder those hills were hard today . . .

Can’t help adding that we are getting kind of excited to reach Toronto. Have been on the road fourteen days now – and the idea of staying in a place with a big bed and a hot shower, with a convenience store and boba tea around the corner doesn’t sound half bad right about now.

Maybe we can barter some porcupine quills for a latte or a cappuccino . . . Only just over 100 miles to go . . .