September 22 - Biking near Cornwall - Ottawa, Ontario

The first blush of dawn awakened me to the possibility of sunrise pictures, so I eased out of bed, grabbed some clothes and the camera, and tiptoed out of the trailer. Unfortunately, you can't really tiptoe in a trailer very well, because when the 200-pound person steps in the 3500-pound trailer, it shakes likes the dickens. Naturally Monika woke up briefly, but she gamely tried to go back to sleep while I tried to capture the experience of a sunrise over the St. Lawrence River from the vantage point of our campground. It certainly was unusual to have a campground from which you could get great pictures of a sunset over the river in the evening and of a sunrise over the river in the morning; not many places would give that type of opportunity, I imagine.

I worked my way along the beach taking pictures as the sun rose, and it changed from a red ball right on the horizon to the blazing golden orb as it arced into the sky. I was particularly intrigued by the pattern of the light on the waves lapping on the shoreline. Those patterns really change by the split second, and that makes photography excruciatingly difficult. A few seagulls kept me company by occasionally flying by on patrol, so a snapped shots of them on the wing, so to speak.

But after an hour or so I gave it up and returned to the trailer for breakfast. Monika had, unfortunately, not slept in very well and was still tired. Not being in any particular hurry, we drove in to Cornwall for our next walk by way of the island-hopping causeway and along the way we watched for wildlife. We missed taking pictures of a groundhog out for a morning stroll, but we did get some of a blue heron was already up looking for breakfast.

We found the directions for the Volksmarch at a gas station, but we decided we were still too tired to do any walking and put that off a day. Instead, we went shopping at Canadian Tire, somewhat like a Canadianized version of K-Mart and bought coffee filters, gloves, a container for mixing milk, and such trivia. We headed back to camp for a nap before we had lunch, and after that we finally had a modicum of energy, still not enough for walking, but we thought we could manage a bike ride.

Our route was westward along the St. Lawrence over to a bird refuge where we had heard they feed the birds at 2:30 p.m. each day. We faced a headwind on the way out but were comforted by the thought that we would have a tail wind on the way back. The bird feeding turned out to be a mass feeding of Canada geese by means of a tractor pulling a bin of corn on the cob (uncooked!) around a field beside the ponds. The geese had been flying in and assembling in the pond, but they were surprisingly slow to discover that the Massey-Ferguson God had once again dropped corncobs all over the field, which surprised me. It reinforced my opinion that "Silly Goose" could be an apt literal description, but Monika suggested that these geese were in the process of migrating and thus never had a chance to learn about the daily feeding cycle at the sanctuary.

As the geese fed, we definitely saw a lot of hissing attacks, wing beating displays, and suchlike attempts to establish the pecking order, and I suspect that it was due to the presence of so many different flocks of geese. We thought we saw family groups of geese where the siblings could be eating on the same ear of corn without fighting. Those groups always seemed to have a slightly larger adult goose watching over them, I suspect a parent. Otherwise, though, each goose would only peck at one ear of corn, and the more aggressive geese would try to fight or bluff off the less aggressive ones to get at the food.

After the feeding we continued cycling westward and the bicycle path was wonderful. The surface was either paved or well graded, fine stone chips that were as smooth as silk. Having ridden parts of this path, driven on the Long Sault Parkway that forms another leg, and walked the section in Cornwall during our Volksmarch, I can confidently say that it was a great bike trail with lots of nice views of the river and things to see along the way. The fall foliage while we were there was simply gorgeous, so that obviously helped give us a good impression of the trail, but I still think it would make a really nice bicycle tour. If you want to do this trail, you should get an informational map from Ontario to help plan the ride; we obtained ours from the nice attendant at our campground.

Pedaling on, we reached a living history museum called "Upper Canada Village Heritage Park" that looked quite extensive. But still facing another hour of bicycling back to camp, we put off touring the museum till the next day and started to pedal back to camp. The wind was, as we had hoped, at our backs and the ride back was shorter, which was good because we were getting more and more tired. Dinner was simply sandwiches, and we relaxed for the early evening by working on the computers while listening to Canadian Public Radio offerings. We finished the evening by reading "The Nanny Diaries" by Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, which was rollicking good fun and also gave some interesting, if possibly apocryphal, insights to the lifestyle of the uppermost social strata of New York.