Thursday, August 16, 2007

wandering in the forest

Chris and I took off last weekend. Originally we'd planned to do a weekend away to celebrate our birthdays, but we ended up booking it on the weekend following my last day of work, and also realized that it is our 2 year anniversary of co-habitating! So, we had a lot to celebrate.

We drove up to the Orangeville area on Saturday and went to the Mono Cliffs Inn for lunch. Lucky for us they had 2 veg items on the menu, so we each ordered one and shared. I'm not convinced the salad was full vegan, but it was delicious and nothing bad happened to me after eating it. Chris had a curry bowl. Then we hiked for a couple of hours along the Mono Cliffs trail , which connects to the Bruce Trail ,and ended up at a great lookout pictured below. Parts of the trail were very sandy (strange) so we got very dirty feet also pictured below!






We then drove up to Shelburne, about 20 minutes further north, and found our "B&B" - which was really a woman named Carole who rents out her basement space...but let me tell you, this woman can COOK! We paid extra to have dinner there, and of course, the breakfast was included, and both were terrific organic vegan meals. There are not a lot of places out there that cater to vegan folk, so we were very pleased to find Carole.

Saturday night we attended the Canadian Open Olde Time Fiddle Contest!! You might think this would be all stomping and fun, but it was some serious business! Especially the kids....they were totally into it, and they were amazing!

Also while in Shelburne we stopped to see a "wind farm", pictured below (the pictures don't do it justice).






Sunday morning we decided to strike out and try a new hiking trail, which turned out to be a bit of an adventure. It was part of Boyne Valley Provincial Park, and the trail we hiked (very badly) was the Primrose Loop trail. It was supposed to be about a 2km loop but we were walking for about 3 hours!!! I don't think we did the loop more than once, but we definitely strayed from the blue-marked path! Chris blames it all on The Best of the Bruce Trail book....so if you're ever talking to him about hiking you might want to recommend that book to him and see how he reacts!

As Chris mentions in his blog, getting lost in the forest was a good thing for us because we saw a deer, a turtle, and we almost got run over by some crazy turkey vultures (at least that's what we think they were)....now I'm not so sure because I just looked up turkey vultures and they don't look anything like what we saw....(they burst out of the forest onto the trail ahead of us and ran so fast we couldn't get the camera out in time). These are some of the pictures we did take.





Anyway, now I'm off to Algonquin for another week of wandering in the forest, this time by canoe.....stay tuned!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

on the august long weekend my friend and i went by that exact wind farm. and you're right...pictures don't do it justice. it was SO COOL! and beautiful on a clear day.
glad you had fun.
sarah