Tobermory - long post.

[sinjun]

Tobermory is beautiful.

Let's see. Friday night, well, I did get into a bit of rp. Nothing spectacular though. *grins* Perhaps a bit more plotting. Saturday morning - out of the house by 9. Got gas and stopped at Tim's for coffee. (That's Tim Horton's donut shop, for those of you who don't know.) On the highway by 9:30am.

Drove north to Owen Sound, listening to ABBA Gold almost the whole way, and chatting with akesteven. Val kept dozing off, so she missed all the fun conversation things.

From the goofy questions department. We kept passing signs for the Nottawasaga River ... Okay then. If it's not a wasaga, what is it?

Stopped at 10th and 3rd, right where we were supposed to be. Discovered metered parking at 25 cents for 3 hours. Wow. Hey, I'm from a city of 2.5 million, not counting the extended suburbs. That's darn cheap parking. However, the problem? No Donna and John. Hrm... *blinkblink* Hey, there's an ice cream shop across the street, let's go ...

So we got ice cream, and it's official. Akesteven and Val need to practice eating ice cream. They are very bad at it, if I do say so. Get more on their clothing, hands and the ground than in their mouths.

We checked back at the parking lot - still no Donna and John. Hrm. Well, it's a little early. So off we go on a little walk - stop in at a craft store, make it back to the parking lot and it's now 1:15 or so. Yeesh, they're late. Maybe we should call...?

Okay, Akesteven gets her cell phone and she has 3 missed calls. You know, maybe we should have taken the cell with us during our wanderings. D'oh! Ah well, sure enough it was Donna calling. She's at 10th and 3rd, where are we. Uhm ...

Turns out we're at 10th east and 3rd east. There is ... about 5 blocks away from us ... 10th west and 3rd west. *blinkblink*

Weird place this town. Anyway, jump into the car and off we go to meet Donna. Turns out John had to work, so couldn't come along with her. It's just the 4 of us. I pass my car keys to Val, and jump in the car with Donna to keep her company. Off we go to Sauble Beach for lunch.

Sauble Beach ... *grins* Sandy beach - lots and lots of people. It was nice to sit and watch the waves, feeling the sun beat down on my back. Lunch was good, and the company was better. Of course, we forgot the blanket in the car, so we had to sit in the sand. But the sand dusted off easily enough, when we'd had enough and got moving again.

We drove up to Wireton where we stopped at a little shop. Hey, it caught our attention, though I can't remember what it was called any more. Oh, and hey, I bought a new deck of Phase 10 cards, so the old ones can be retired. ;) From there we drove on further northwest to find our bed and breakfast. The Cape Chin Connection Inn. It took us a while to find it, because it's way off the beaten trail. Still, it was really pretty, and Anne was extremely helpful and a lovely friendly woman. She gave us lots of good advice, warning us about the rattlesnakes (Massassauga Rattler - the only poisonous snake we've got!) and the black bears. Even paradise has it's issues, it seems. Anyway, she recommended a couple restaurants for us for dinner, and gave us directions for a hike. The Bruce trail goes on for hundreds of kilometers, so it's useful to find a little side trail sometimes, especially if you don't have too long. We went on the Devil's Monument Sidetrail, which was fun. The Devil's monument is a rock formation that stands almost as tall as the Niagara Escarpment, about 40 feet tall. It's got a big hole in the middle, and seems made of tons of flat rocks stacked on top of each other, almost like a wild freaky Jenga game.

We didn't see any bears, though Akesteven and Val did see a snake. Don't know what sort, cause I didn't see it, and they couldn't identify it. My guess is it was just a garter snake, but I could be wrong.

Dinner was in Dyer's Bay at Rocky Raccoons. Don't let the name fool you- this place had wonderful Thai food and such. We had a bottle of Pelee Island Gewurtztraminer wine to go with our Georgian Bay whitefish with dill mango sauce, basmati rice, and asparagus. Yum!

We also did a bit of rock collecting, and can I just say that the spiders there are HUGE! Elyse would so have a problem with them. And they scurry much too quickly. Gee, maybe Yasmin could keep one as a pet or something. They have to be >< that close to sentience!

One side of the peninsula is sandy beaches, the other side is rocky. Sauble beach is the sandy side, and our hotel is the rocky side. So we did get a few rocks, with neat fossils. This is an area with lots of little pressed fossils, though I'm sure it's been picked clean of all the really important ones long since. Anyway, we had several nice walks as the opportunity arose.

In the Bed and Breakfast, we got a suite to ourselves - 2 bedrooms and a shared washroom, plus a small common room. It was really pretty and quite nice. There was a fan in each bedroom. More than enough room for all of us. If anselon had been able to come, there'd still have been lots of room. Our alarm clock Sunday morning was the rip-roaring thunderstorm that raged through between 6:30am and 7:30am, more or less. It was impressive, even if we didn't get out of our beds until it was over. Still, we were downstairs for breakfast by 8.

And by 9:30am, we were on the road, headed north to the actual town of Tobermory. ;) We did some sightseeing, went down to the water at the tip of the peninsula - visited the tourist shops, had "eye poppin', jaw droppin' whitefish and chips" for lunch, and ice cream from the Sweet Shop for dessert. Yum. We had been planning to do another hike, but instead we found we were a little to lazy what with the fricking heat and all. So we shopped instead.

Eventually, off we went to the cars, getting ourselves back on the road south. We decided to try to take the back roads over on the beach side down, so we could see the water. Well, what a fiasco! Talk about laugh, though. We kept missing turns - the roads weren't marked on the maps or they weren't marked with signs ... it took us an hour and a half to go ... about 30 km, I think. *laughs* We gave up when it occurred to us that running out of gas would be a bad thing, and then off we went back to the main road. Gassed up just north of Wireton, and then headed south on the main highway. Within 10 minutes we'd come twice as far as in the whole previous hour and a half. Sheesh.

Ah well, it was lots of fun, and there are some absolutely gorgeous houses up there. Wow.

Drove down to Mount Forest (?) I think that's the name of the small town, where we found a Tim's. This is where Donna parted ways with us, as she had to go West, and we went east. The rest of the drive, (I took over from Val) was pretty run of the mill. And we got home just before 8pm on Sunday.

Whoo. There you have it. My weekend in a nutshell. Wordy type, aren't I?