September 24 - Boat trip through the 1000 Islands of the St. Lawrence - Ottawa, Ontario

Our main task for the day was to relocate to the vicinity of Kingston, Ontario, where our last Volksmarch in Canada awaited us. I also had one eye cocked open for the trip back to Virginia that we planned for Sunday, so I suggested that we find a campsite near the bridge to the U.S. where Interstate 81 begins as that was the first part of our route south. Monika found the Ivy Lea Ontario Provincial Park right on the St. Lawrence and right next to the bridge, so after getting lost once we found the park and picked a site for the next couple of nights.

We were surprisingly tired, and I was beginning to suspect that getting a really good night's sleep was absolutely essential to keeping up with a physically demanding schedule of activities. Either that, or Canada had tsetse fly populations carrying "sleeping sickness" and one had bitten us, but that didn't seem likely. Be that as it may, after setting up camp and having lunch, we just couldn't drag ourselves out of the trailer and turned in for a short nap instead. That refreshed us enough to go looking for a boat tour of the 1,000 Islands region of the St. Lawrence.

We found a 1 hour boat tour out of Gananoque, about 15 kilometers down the 1,000 Island Parkway from our campground, that left at 4:30 p.m., which left us plenty of time to get there. The tour left a bit later than scheduled due to waiting 15 minutes for a busload of French Canadian tourists, but we finally departed the dock shortly before 5:00 p.m. and headed out for the islands.

There was, as it turned out, a formal legal definition of an "island", which was something I have always wondered about, and the archetypical coral atoll with 1 palm tree that you see in the comics would definitely not qualify. At least here on the 1,000 Islands area, the legal definition of an island was a land surface of at least 6 feet square and at least 2 trees! By this definition there are actually 1,600 islands in this region of the river, and many of them are miniscule indeed. In fact, we were rather astonished at how people had managed to perch a small cottage on a piece of rock not much bigger than a large living room rug and still have room for 2 trees to grow!

Many of the islands were, of course, larger and had more extensive residences built on them. On some of those we saw some very nice houses together with matching boathouses on the shore. Back in the 1800s these islands were relatively cheap, but now they are, like any other limited resort property, quite expensive. I was happy to hear that the Canadian Park system owned a few of the bigger ones and kept them in a relatively pristine state for public use.

This island region originated when the hard Canadian Shield rock strata traversing the area resisted the water erosion of the St. Lawrence over the millennia, resulting in a plethora of small, rocky islands. After the War of 1812, the islands were divided between the U.S. to the south and Canada to the north in such a fashion as to keep the total area of the islands about equal although Canada has a numerical superiority of about 2/3 of them. Drawing that international boundary must have been quite a task, and one quirky thing that resulted from it was a pair of almost adjacent islands where one is Canadian and the other U.S. The bridge between the two is reputedly the shortest international bridge between the U.S. and Canada. I can well believe that because it looked like a tiny footbridge you might find over a small farm pond.

On our way back to the dock we were followed by some ever-hopeful seagulls. I think someone at the stern was feeding them and they gracefully cruised alongside us looking for handouts. I should mention that 3 hour tours are also available if you would like a longer visit to these islands, but we thought we had seen a nice variety of them plus the island dwellings in the 1 hour tour.

Besides, the shorter tour still left us time to stop off at a Tim Horton's for a bowl of chili plus a roll for Abendessen before returning to camp. Back at the trailer we had a couple more pieces of the ice cream "pizza" for desert and then worked on the computers for a while before retiring to the bedroom and finishing "The Nanny Diaries", which ended on a bittersweet but realistic note, and then turning in for the night.