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September 11 Sunday Bicycle touring from Comber Ontario to Point Pelee to Lake Erie and Whitley Ontario A ball tournament is happening today. The concession workers start to arrive at 7 AM. We get on our touring bicycles and ride until Leamington, about thirty kilometres away. We buy groceries. The women working at the store are so nice. They put ice in with our milk, fill our water bottles with ice, and then give us another bag of ice. It does look like another warm day for cycle touring. It is already 24º C. The sky is a clear blue. It is beautiful to be cycling down the road with the leafy green trees. We cycled to Point Pelee National Park. Bicycles are free to enter. We cruise eight kilometres along a quiet road with huge tulip trees overhanging the roadway. It is only 10 AM, so there are not many people yet. We park our bikes and walk three kilometres out onto a sand-gravel spit to the very end of land. We stand at the southern-most point of mainland in Canada. Lake Erie surrounds us on three sides. The spit is about twenty feet wide at its narrowest point. The most southerly land in all of Canada is Middle Island in Lake Erie. We are about fourteen kilometres from there at a latitude of 42º North. This is about the same latitude as northern California. Pelee Island grows grapes and has a winery. There is a ferry out to the island. Point Pelee is one of Canada's smallest national parks, but it gets nearly half a million visitors each year. Three hundred and fifty different bird species have been spotted here. There are Fox snakes also; they are yellow with black isosceles triangles and give off a smell like a red fox when handled. Monarch butterflies are known to rest in a small grove of trees here on their southward migration to Mexico. This morning we bicycle toured what we termed the Tomato Route. Hundreds of squashed red tomatoes littered the gravel shoulder. I managed to pick up four that weren't smashed too badly. A few kilometres down the road, Sharon asked, "What's that smell?" "It smells like hamburgers or something," I said. "No," she replied. "It smells like ketchup." I looked at her as if she were losing her marbles. In a couple of kilometres we pass a Heinz ketchup factory. Who knew? Speaking of vegetables, on our bicycle ride yesterday we found carrots on the road too. They were still covered in earth and were among the crunchiest we have ever tasted. We found another two good tomatoes that must have fallen off the back of the truck at low speed as it pulled out of the field onto the highway. Spectacular with fresh bread and cheese. Later today, after spending a few hours at the Sanctuary picnic site, we went back to the boardwalk Marsh Tour and climbed a wooden tower for a view. Yep. Sure enough. Lots of marsh. They had canoe and bike rental. The parking lot was full, so there must be more than a few people around enjoying the warm weather and getting out for a bike ride or two. We wound around some country roads on our bikes, that weren't even on our map. Sharon knew the general direction of travel by watching the sun and we just kept to that direction as best we could. In about twenty-five kilometres we hit Whitley, the only town for miles around. We bought groceries for supper and pedalled north out of town, away from the Lake Erie shoreline where a lot of houses are built. We didn't have to bike far before we found a conservation area. It has picnic tables and even a porta potty. A lady was walking her dog when we arrived. There are houses across the road from us. Now it is 8:03 PM and the sun has set, so it won't be much longer until it is totally dark. We have about a half hour. There are quite a few mosquitoes buzzing us. I can hear crickets. And we are heavily back in katydid country. The forests seem to be alive with alien voices. We set up our bicycle camping tent in a stand of small Jack pine trees that look dead at the bottom. They all have a trunk diameter of about six inches. A small bank rises strategically to block the view of the road and prying eyes that may spot us and our fully loaded touring bicycles. As we cycled along today, we kept seeing flocks of little black birds. They line the telephone wire, thick, sitting there for three wires deep for three telephone poles long, until we ride by and then with a flurry of feathers they fly off to perform synchronized aerial acrobatics before alighting farther down the line, to do it all again when we arrive on our bicycles and scare them into flight once again. |
