September 21 - Volksmarch in Kanata - Ottawa, Ontario

Either due to lack of sleep or simply the cumulative fatigue of 4-5 hours of exercise for the last 3 days, we were tired when we ate breakfast and still tired when we signed up for a Volksmarch in the town of Kanata at a Loeb store just down the road from our campsite. The Voyageurs club has over 10 Year Round Events scattered over the area around Ottawa, and we really had trouble deciding which one to walk because we knew so little about them. Trevor's idea of a web site with walk maps plus selected pictures that would pop up at the appropriate points on each route seemed to me, at least, to be a great way to preview a walk and decide if you wanted to do it or not. Since we didn't have that, we chose the walk nearest our campsite on the basis of convenience.

The Kanata, Ontario, Volksmarch route resembled a strand of cooked spaghetti that has been dropped on a plate. It just squiggled all over the place using a chain of walking paths through the parks and subdivisions. We saw a lot of pretty small parks and nicely kept homes from the 1970s through 1990s (judging by the sizes of the trees) that resembled U.S. subdivisions of the same era. We also saw a lot of flowers, which is always a joy, and I had fun trying to take pictures of the bumblebees that were busily trying to make hay while the blossoms bloomed (to mix yet another metaphor).

After two hours of steady walking we were uncharacteristically exhausted and just slogging along, which was too bad because the last segment of the path was along a very pretty small lake. The Canadian geese were practicing formation flying in preparation for their upcoming trek south, and I was fascinated by all the honking and squawking that accompanied the flying. I wondered if that was all some kind of communication code, a more general sound of encouragement from one goose to the others, or sounds that indicated the flight status of the honker (as in, "I'm pooped; let's land now!). Hopefully an ethnologist or ornithologist can enlighten me on that issue some day.

From the lake we just curled back to the truck past some fiery red sumac bushes and kind of levered ourselves slowly back into the seats.

I drove us back to the trailer where we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch before hitching the trailer and driving east and south to the St. Lawrence River for our next campground. I was hoping eating the snack would give me some energy, but the snack turned out to be a mistake because the only net effect was to make me uncontrollably sleepy about an hour into the drive. I caught myself going into half-second micro sleeps and decided I could not safely continue, so I pulled over and let Monika have a turn at the driving. Fortunately her metabolism does not react to a meal like mine and so she was awake, if also rather tired.

After crossing the neck of Ontario to the St. Lawrence, we actually drove out onto the river along a parkway built along a chain of islands. That gave us really nice scenic views of the river both to our left and to our right. The speed limit was only 55 kilometers per hour, but you really don't want to go any faster than that when you are towing a Tin Blimp and have wonderful scenery to look at. We found the single campground that was still open this late in the season and circled around the loops until we found a nice, level campsite between the washrooms (functional) and the riverside (pretty). I promptly fell asleep for a Supernap while Monika worked on her autobiography for a couple of hours, after which we had Abendessen. Monika transcribed another German folk song into the computer after dinner while I worked on the journal, but we did at the tag end of the day have a beautiful sunset out over the St. Lawrence, so we grabbed the camera and walked along the shore taking pictures of the sun setting across the water.

The sunlight reflected off some cirrus clouds in the west as the sun went under, illuminating them in a stunning shade of pink against the deep blue evening sky. We also found some cooperative ducks who were willing to dabble around some seaweed just off shore and I tried to frame them in the sunlight reflecting off the water. Monika chased some gulls into the air for me at one point, but the Canadian geese stubbornly refused to fly for us and just slowly swam away off shore with their rumps turned toward us. Avians can be so uncooperative!

The sunset show was fun while it lasted, but finally it was over and we retired into the trailer for the rest of the evening. Monika had to download pictures again and I had to try to describe a great sunset in the journal, which is certainly one case where a good picture is worth a thousand words! Consider for a moment if I replaced all the pictures in this photo journal with 1,000 words, exactly how long (and boring!) the resulting document would be. At the end of the evening we turned in early to attempt to reduce our fatigue level back to some more normal point because things just weren't that much fun when we were so dog tired.