freshwater ferry and an inexplicable hill
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today Kenny and I spent the morning playing on the small private beach in front of the "lodge" while Mari packed.
Mari told me that this "division of labour" was fair because I'm usually away and don't get a chance to play with the boy.
In exchange I drove for about 5-6 hours.
We booted across the island one final time and caught our ferry with an hour to spare (as required). Or to put it another way, we made the 60-minute cut-off by less than five minutes (thanks in large part to a painfully long delay at a construction site).
Then it was the smooth 90 minute trip to Tobermory. And then hell began. There's one long road leading down the length of the Bruce peninsula, and some drivers shall we just say don't have a lot of patience for the huge line of cars that pours out from the ferry onto that road. One fellow, memorably, appeared in the rear view mirror at a rate about fifty percent faster than our own speed. He veered between us and the car immediately behind us only long enough to allow an oncoming car or two to pass. He then zipped back out into the opposite lane and proceeded to pass some 15-20 cars. When he pulled in the second time he didn't really vacate the other lane, but rather straddled the yellow line sending other cars into the shoulders. Then he was off again. When we were later passed by a police car and an ambulance I thought unkind things.
We played a game to pass the time. One of us would say the name of a city in the world, and then the other would say a name that began with the last letter in the name of the previous city. It eventually degenerated into trying to think up cities that left the counterparty with difficult letters. My favourite was to stick Mari with "X" cities. I only knew "Xian" but it turned out that she's more familiar with China's many X cities. She kept sticking me with "O", and I eventually had Omsk, Owen Sound, Oslo (ha!), Ottawa, Oshawa, Oberhausen (yes, Oberhausen, I've been there) and I had Oakville and Odessa in reserve.
We stopped to eat in Collingwood at the same nice little Thai place where we'd eaten with "Oma to Opa" in May. And then we went to the liquor store. But those were our only stops between 15:00 and 21:00. Mari drove the remainder of the trip which, while benefitting from Kenny's being asleep was unfortunately also after the sun had gone down.
When we finally got to the cottage, Mari was navigating the unlit road into Robin's Point when we saw some kids on either side of the street pretending to be holding a rope across the street. I recognized it as a (rather tired) Internet stunt but Mari didn't know what to make of it and slowed. This encouraged the shits to chase the car, one of them even kicked the car. It went through my mind to go back afterward but I eventually thought better of it.
And I've got another geomorphology/geology question about Ontario. What's the substantial hill that stands all by itself south/south-west of Midland? It's much too large to be a glacial drumlin (drumlin meaning 'little hill' after all) but it stands so far from everything else. It's large enough that they've built some ski hills on its eastern flank. Hmmm.