Thursday, July 25, 2013

Circle Tour - Day 9

For only the sixth time since I established this blog, I failed to post.  You will learn about that later. 

I woke up at 6:00 a.m. It was so, so cold but I had lined the medium sized bag with the flannel bag and slept well enough. Getting out of the slleeping bag was the problem. When I checked the temperature in the car it read 42 degrees F. I had been told it would be 8 degrees C but that would have been equal to 47 degrees F. In other words, it was very, very cold.

I made oatmeal and tea as usual and packed up everything except the tent which was wet with dew. I drove over to the convenience area, started a load of laundry, took a shower, and went back to throw the clothes in the dryer. The attendant chatted with me for a while as the clothes dried. I admired her blue camping hat with the Ontario Parks decal and asked where I could buy one for Gary but she said they were official attire and were never sold. He would have loved it, too.

Laundry done, it was back to take the tent down and I was on my way west. At Terrace Bay, I stopped at the visitors center and was able to catch up with my e-mail. The attendants did their best to convince me to go down to the lake for Superior Days but I was on my way to another festival ten miles away, the Schreiber Heritage Days.

When I arrived, I ran around to find out what was happening. First of all, there was a parade of fire engines followed by antique cars. That took about ten minutes. There was another parade, too, but I was using the bathroom in the in the community center and missed it. In other words, Schreiber is a small town, much like Seymour.

There was a hamburger fry going on but I never got back to that. There were tables with vendors of all kinds of things, including a big display of Tupperware. I spent some time getting stickers from the emergency squad for my autoharp case. There was a writer and his editor, who was also his wife. They, too were self-publishing using Create Space so we compared notes on that.

I appreciated the art show going on in the gym. There were some fine paintings but all were out of my price range.

Then I found out that my 2:00 pm slot had been moved back to 3:00 because someone had hired a magician at the last minute. By the time the kids were done with that show, they were brought to the gym to listen to my stories, but they were either wired or tuckered out. I told stories to three wiggly boys and felt good that I held their attention for 25 minutes. At that point they skedaddled and I was left with adults, so I switched gears with a half hour adult performance. I had to end then because the helpers arrived to help take down the paintings. Not my best work, but what can you do?

Donna, the librarian who hired me, must have felt bad about that so she took me to the library so I could write my blog. Then she asked me if I would like to go out to eat. I asked her to give me a half hour.
I drove to the Rossport campground (part of the Rainbow Falls Provincial Park), signed in and set up the tent on a site that looked over Lake Superior. It was the same site Gary and I camped in a year before. I planned on sitting in the sun there the next morning, maybe even go for a swim. Setting up a campsite takes me fifteen minutes so I had time for a few photos.


A loan rununculus had worked it's way into the cracks of the rocks.


I drove to the nearby village of Rossport and met Donna at Serendipity Gardens, a lovely restaurant on the side of the hill with flowers all around.

 We split an order of fish caught that afternoon in the lake, delicious. While we ate, Donna told me about raising her kids in the forest in a house with no plumbing....just an outhouse and an outdoor pump. If the creek flooded, she had to canoe the children across to get them to school.

We finished off with giant sundaes.


I returned to the campground but this time I would sleep in my fleece clothes so I would stay warm the whole night.  

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