Victoria's Sunday

The temperatures on Sunday morning were definitely better than on Saturday morning. The icy blast through the shower door was somewhat more tolerable and the sun had a definite warming quality as I strode purposefully across the campground. I do that, stride purposely, although I'm not sure that I really had any purpose in mind.

We'd promised ourselves a cooked brekkie, not on the open fire but on the little portable gas hob. We set the big tadpole to work and in no time he had bacon, sausage and egg whipped up, even with some al fresco toast. The toast was still done in an electric toaster but we had it outside and plugged into Towed Haul's handy dandy exterior power ports.

Funnily enough, I didn't partake of of the breakfast, settling for nutty toast and jam. The vegan Mrs Toad had Marmite on her nutty toast so we were all well catered for. We live the glamper's life, we do.

I decided to take the hound out for her constitutional and swing by Toronto Andy's Airstream behemoth 34 footer in the lower campground. He and his missus had visitors but we chatted for a while and I admired the trailer, especially as he tows it with a Honda Odyssey minivan. It was great to meet him as he's one of the founder members of the "You Can't Tow That With That" club.

From there I walked the hound down onto the beach for a while and then back up to the camp site in time for a quick lunch and preparations for going to Port Elgin, about an hour north of Point Farms. We planned a brief stop at the Park Office to avail ourselves of the free WiFi up there but as we drove I noticed that the tyre warning light on the Toadmobile's dash was lit and, on closer inspection whilst at the office, sure enough I found a nail in the rear driver's side tyre. It being Sunday on a long weekend, there was no way I was going to get it repaired straight away so we decided a run into Goderich would be better, where I could get some air into the tyre to see if it would hold for a day or so.

We made our way down to Goderich harbour to find a big bulk carrier coming in from Lake Huron, ready to take on a load of grain (or so we assumed as the ship was high in the water and docking at the grain silos). The Miedwie was a Nassau registered ship owned by the Polish Polsteam company. It was great to see this ocean-going vessel being nudged around by the little tugs in the Maitland River and quite interesting to think that it could and would sail down through the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence Seaway and out onto the Atlantic, all from this little town in southern Ontario. Actually, salt is the big export from Goderich but grain was the cargo this day. 

We walked out along the newly re-furbished harbour wall, met some Duck Dynasty types on the quay side who were both quaintly without much in the way of teeth, and then had an ice cream by the beach in the ever increasing warmth of the afternoon. There's a bit of work going on down on the lake's shore, not least the re-location of the old station. It's long been disused but is a handsome red-brick affair that was looking a little lost about 300 yards from the boardwalk. But guess what? The good people of Goderich have had the station moved! It's been picked up whole, moved about 250 yards closer to the beach and turned about 90 degrees from an east-west orientation to north-south. The building looked to have survived its trip quite well and now we shall see what they eventually do with it. Here's some video from CTV.

Back at camp, having put some air in the tyre, we had a mooch around and bumped into Jim from Burlington again. His 30' International Airstream was very new and looked lovely nestling in the trees. He's a nice fella that Jim and we're so glad that we had a chance to chat. He's an avid reader of this blog so I hope you like the mentions, Jim.

Supper was prepared on the open fire again and we settled into a nice DVD/snoozy evening again, which was really very nice, even as night became cold again. 

Victoria's Monday would see most campers packing up to go home but not us, as we had an extra day booked. Tune in to the next edition of the blog to see what we got up to out there in the wilderness. OK, maybe not wilderness, but there were lots of trees!