Vagabond Tracks — by Paul & Amy

2 September:  The town of M’Chigeeng on Manitoulin Island was holding its annual Pow Wow on this day, so we went to see it.  Ojibway account for a fairly large proportion of Manitoulin’s population.  Along with allied tribes who speak related Algonquian languages, they have long been predominant in the northern Great Lakes region.  They were one of the earlier tribes to acquire guns from Europeans, forced tribes such as the Sioux to move farther west, and successfully fended off their enemies the Iroquois from farther east.  We had been traveling through the traditional land of the Ojibway (sometimes called Chippewa, especially in the U.S.) in Manitoba, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and upper Michigan on our way to Ontario.

The M’Chigeeng Pow Wow was something like a town fair, with booths selling food and handcrafted items.  The focal event for the afternoon was an opening procession of dignitaries in ceremonial regalia followed by various groups of dancers, each to the accompaniment of drums and chanting.  The dancers, including both genders and a wide range of ages, were dressed in traditional costumes and danced in a circle around the bandstand inside a wider circle of benches holding the spectators.  The costumes were not limited to buckskins and eagle feather headdresses, but displayed a wide range of styles and colors.  This was especially true for the women.  In one dance they twirled around holding large colorful shawls.  In another they wore “jingle dresses” hung with dozens of small bells (traditionally fashioned from pieces of tin cans rolled into a narrow cone shape).  Although the Pow Wow does provide a show for tourists, more importantly it is a traditional way for the local community to gather together, keep some of their traditional customs alive, and honor those who have given significant local and national service.  For lunch we bought a nish taco, which is a fried-dough “scone” topped with a hot tomato-based sauce, with typical taco toppings such as tomato, lettuce, meat, and cheese sprinkled on top (one was large enough for the both of us).

3-4 September:  After a ferry ride from Manitoulin Island to the northern tip of the Bruce Peninsula, we camped two nights in Bruce Peninsula National Park.  The Bruce Trail, a public footpath following the edge of the Niagara Escarpment from the Niagara River to Tobermory (where our ferry landed), is over 550 miles long and passes through Bruce Peninsula National Park along the shore of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay.  The Niagara Escarpment was not formed by a fault, but rather by differential erosion in which the upper side was protected by a resistant layer of dolomitic limestone cap rock.  Its most well-known feature is Niagara Falls, but there are many other stretches of prominent cliffs along its length.

Bruce Peninsula NP is one of the four most-visited of all Canadian national parks.  There the Niagara Escarpment forms cliffs along the eastern (Georgian Bay) shoreline of the Bruce Peninsula.  Although the cliffs rising from the lake are impressive, in places the submerged height is even greater.  One particular formation in the park, The Grotto, has become such a popular tourist attraction that the park limited day-use visitors to four hours in the Grotto parking lot during the busy Labour Day weekend while we were there.  The crowds thinned out considerably between Sunday, when we hiked past The Grotto, and Monday, when we hiked another section of the Bruce Trail along the shore (it turned rainy Monday, plus it’s a good half drive for folks returning to the metro Toronto area).

5-7 September:  We headed south, generally following the Niagara Escarpment, to Ontario’s Headwaters region, where the Nottawasaga River (Lake Huron drainage), the Grand River (Lake Erie drainage), and the Credit River (Lake Ontario drainage) originate.  We stopped to bike a section of the Elora Cataract rail trail on our way to visit long-time friends Bob and Paula, who have lived in the Hockley Valley for over 40 years.  An advantage of their house being just a few steps from the Nottawasaga River is that they can look down from their bedroom window to see salmon swimming upriver from Lake Huron to spawn.  A disadvantage is that in unusually wet springs the river can overflow its banks and the rising water table can infiltrate their basement (which happened this year).

Their son Matthew, a philosophy professor who has been teaching at a university in Egypt for the last few years, was home on an extended visit.  We hadn’t seen him since he was in high school, and he told us the happy news that he is engaged to be married.  Bob and Paula’s next door neighbor Fred took us on a very pleasant bike ride along the valley and on the Vicki Barron Lakeside Trail through the Island Lake Conservation Area and around the Orangeville Reservoir.  Fred has been active, both as a volunteer and as an elected town official, in habitat restoration projects on the town conservation land we were riding through.

On a shopping trip into town, Bob and Paula introduced us to a distinctive tradition that Orangeville has embraced.  Instead of completely removing the trees that die along the town streets, a tall stump is left in place and carved into a work of art.  Since 2003, the number of tree sculptures has grown to 55, created by 19 artists plus the Headwaters Carving Club.

8-10 September:  The last area we explored on our homeward route was around Canada’s capital, Ottawa.  We camped about a half hour north of the city, in Gatineau Park.  The first day we spent most of our time in the Canadian Museum of History.  This is a large and attractive museum, with so much to see that we concentrated mainly on the First Peoples of the Northwest Coast and First Peoples exhibit halls on the lower level and decided that we would like to come back in the future to go through the upper three floors.

We also very much enjoyed the 45-minute movie Rocky Mountain Express, which told the story of building Canada’s first transcontinental railway through the rugged Canadian Rockies, with beautiful sequences of a restored steam locomotive speeding through spectacular scenery.  This film was particularly meaningful to us after having traveled through Rogers Pass and Kicking Horse Pass this summer.  In the late afternoon we biked around Ottawa’s Capitol Cycle Route, a loop running along the bank of the Rideau Canal, through a residential/industrial area, then back near the Ottawa River and the Parliament buildings.  The canal, built in 1832 in case of war between the U.S. and Canada, connects Ottawa with Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.

We spent the next day exploring Gatineau Park.  During certain dates and times, the parkway running through it is open only to bicycles and pedestrians, making it a popular destination for cyclists from the nearby capitol region.  This was a Sunday, and some of the most popular trailhead parking lots were full and even overflowing.  We took three short loop hikes.  One led past a waterfall to the beautifully landscaped former estate of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s Prime Minister during most of the 1920s through 1940s.  Our other two hikes led to viewpoints overlooking the broad plain of the Ottawa River valley from the Eardley Escarpment, which was formed by faulting that lifted the ancient granite of the Canadian Shield followed by erosion of the overlying sedimentary rock during the ice age.

11 September:  Back home after a little over five months away, we have many fond memories of this year’s trip—visiting friends and family; exploring Peru with Abby; camping with Lowry & Kyle and our 9-month-old granddaughter Corwyn; cruising in the San Juan Islands with Gordon; hiking in the majestic Canadian Rockies with OFOC buddies Rob, Judith, Dick, and Sonia; … and the list goes on.  We met many great people in our travels, and nearly everywhere we went we learned about places we hadn’t known about that would be interesting to see on future trips.  Our camper maps on Vagabond now display stickers for all 10 Canadian provinces and 37 of the lower 48 states, but we certainly don’t feel that we are finished traveling to them.  There are plenty more sights, hikes, and bike rides in them tempting us to return.

This is our first new blog post since September 2017, when we completed our second camping trip from N.H. to the west coast and back.  Between then and now we’ve been on a few short trips in “Vagabond.”  The longest of those was two and a half weeks to Quebec’s Chic Choc Mountains and Gaspé Peninsula and the east coast of New Brunswick in 2018.  Other trips included weekends to the White Mountains in N.H, the Connecticut Lakes region of N.H., and the Thousand Islands region along the St. Lawrence River in upstate N.Y., as well as two weeks to the Virginia & D.C. area.  Now we have begun our third long (multiple-month) post-retirement trip.  This time we’ll be out for 72 days, headed as far west as Colorado before exploring for the first time six states in the south-central region as we make our way back to N.H. before winter sets in.

The map of the states on the side of our camper has stickers for each of the lower 48 states.  Our self-imposed criteria for earning each new state sticker are to camp in the state, go for a hike in it, and go for a bike ride in it.  Then we noticed that the map also has stickers for the five Great Lakes, and had to decide upon qualifications for putting them on the map.  We came up with camping in the watershed area of the lake, plus at least two of the following three activities:  hiking in the lake’s watershed, biking in the lake’s watershed, and swimming in the lake.  The two Great Lakes for which we had not previously earned a sticker, Ontario and Erie, were our first goals on this year’s trip.

13 Aug: We found a very nice swimming and picnicking area at New York’s Fair Haven Beach State Park west of Oswego for our Lake Ontario swim.  The campground in that park looked very attractive, so we would like to camp there on some future trip.  Continuing west to Lake Erie, we then swam and camped at Evangola State Park.

14 Aug:  Traveling from New York to Ohio, we stopped at Erie, Penn., to visit the Erie Maritime Museum.  From its earliest days, Erie was important to both commercial and military activities on the Great Lakes because of its large, well-sheltered harbor.  Among the many excellent displays there were several about the War of 1812 naval battle won by the fleet of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (“Don’t Give Up The Ship”) to establish control of the upper Great Lakes over the British.  Late in the afternoon, we went on a sail on the schooner Lettie G. Howard, which was originally built in Massachusetts and sailed for many years as a commercial fishing vessel.  We passengers participated by helping the crew hoist the large sails.  A perfect sailing breeze made for a thoroughly enjoyable sail.

15-24 Aug:  A keystone in scheduling our trip itinerary was a weekend reunion of Amy’s cousins and their families at the summer camp that was formerly Amy’s grandparents’ farm in rural Holmes County northeast of Columbus, Ohio.  For nine days before the reunion, we traveled around Ohio seeing other cousins and friends, riding our bikes on scenic bike trails, and visiting archaeological and other attractions.

First we stayed two nights and a day with Amy’s cousin Ann and her husband Floyd.  Their son Richard, who works with his dad, gave us a very informative tour of their 24-acre nursery and its facilities.  They propagate a wide variety of shrubs and trees, specializing on the family Ericaceae, which includes rhododendrons and azaleas.  Both Floyd and Rich did their graduate work at Ohio State, and they have recently done some very interesting studies on a little-known species of fungus, which has a symbiotic relationship with rhododendrons (valuable knowledge for successfully growing healthy plants).

We next camped for four nights at Caesar Creek State Park, between Columbus and Cincinnati.  While there, we saw fossils on a hike along the creek, biked on the Little Miami Scenic Trail, and visited the Fort Ancient State Memorial.  The LMST is a paved rail trail forming part of the Ohio to Erie Trail, which extends from Cincinnati to Cleveland.  The two sections on which we biked were very pleasant and well-shaded. “Fort Ancient” was probably not a fort.  It appears to have been more of a social, trading, and ceremonial gathering place.  It is a ridge-top enclosure built by people of the Hopewell culture, who lived in the area during about 200 BC to 400 AD.  Located on a bluff above the Little Miami River, it is surrounded by an earthen wall about 3.5 miles long with dozens of gaps that provided access to the interior and would have precluded military defense.  It was built in three major stages over about 400 years.  Small mounds inside coincide with astronomical alignments.  The museum on site has excellent displays explaining Ohio history and prehistorical cultures.  The next day we were treated to a fine dinner by Paul’s distant cousin Mike and his wife Michelle in the Golden Lamb restaurant in Lebanon, founded in 1803.  The Golden Lamb has hosted 12 U.S. Presidents, from as early as John Quincy Adams to as recent as George W. Bush.

On the way from Caesar Creek to the Harris family reunion, we visited friends Lisa & Lisle in Delaware, Ohio, and another distant cousin of Paul’s, Ellen, and her husband George.  Mike, Ellen, and Paul all are descended from John and Jane Stitt, who raised 10 children in County Down, northern Ireland, and immigrated to America in the mid-1800s.  While visiting Ellen and George in Columbus, we stopped for ice cream a Jeni’s ice cream shop, established by the author of our favorite ice cream recipe book.  While camping in Ohio, we noticed several trees unfamiliar to us New Englanders, particularly nut trees like walnuts, buckeyes, and hickory species we don’t see in N.H.  In the morning before the Harris cousins met at the reunion, we rode our bikes on the Holmes County Trail, a newly finished section of the Ohio to Erie bike trail.

The family reunion was well attended, with all but two of the 14 cousins of Amy’s generation present, along with many of their families.  The weather was perfect for strolling about the former farm and reminiscing about the times they would visit their grandparents there.

 

25-28 Aug:  We left before the main breakfast on the last morning of the reunion to begin our long drive to Colorado, so Amy could arrive in time for the biennial rug hooking conference in Denver that she is attending and exhibiting in.  That meant four straight days of driving, with little time to stop to sightsee along the way.  We stayed at three campgrounds we had stayed in before, conveniently close to I-70 a day’s drive apart.  At the first one, Hickory Run State Park in Indiana, we had time before dark for a short walk on a hiking trail through a scenic sandstone canyon.

On the second day, we stopped for lunch at Vandalia, which was the second capital of Illinois (before Springfield), where Abraham Lincoln served two terms as a state representative early in his career.  The old statehouse is still there and now houses an Abraham Lincoln museum.  Vandalia was also the western terminus of the National Road, which was built in the early 1800s to facilitate travel west from Cumberland, Md., to what was the “frontier” in those days.

We began our third day by stopping to read the excellent historical panels at a kiosk beside the Katy Trail State Park in Missouri.  We had camped near the ruins of the roundhouse turntable at the site formerly known as Franklin Junction.  Franklin was established in 1816 near the western frontier of the U.S., five years before Missouri became a state.  In 1821, wagon traffic began from Franklin to Santa Fe, New Mexico, along what became the Santa Fe Trail—an important freight route until 1880, when a railroad finally reached Santa Fe.  Our fourth day was all driving, and we arrived at our daughter Lowry’s in late afternoon for a fun reunion with our granddaughter Corwyn, who had just turned three a few days ago.

28 Aug-1 Sep:  Three is certainly an age of rapidly expanding horizons, and video chats are not an adequate substitute for personal contact over several days.  We so enjoyed seeing how much Corwyn has learned since we saw her in November and how she is developing her own personality and ability for independent imaginative play.  We read stories, played hide and seek, and generally had a great time together.

Amy thoroughly enjoyed the rug hooking conference, including a workshop in needle punching, a technique new to her.  Some very impressive hooking was on display in the exhibit area of the conference, including Amy’s Vail Pass tapestry, which we hung in Lowry and Kyle’s living room after the conference ended.  Two of Amy’s Monday-night craft group friends and another family member of one of them had also come out to the conference, so including all four husbands we filled a table of eight at the banquet.  At the auction following the dinner, we were entertained by some very spirited bidding on certain items (as we sat on our wallets).

The day after the hooking conference ended, we were joined by N.H. friends Nancy and Bill and also Kyle’s parents Jim and Cheryl for a big turkey dinner cooked by Lowry.

2-3 Sep:  Lowry, Kyle, and Corwyn came up to RMNP for a day trip with us, then returned home while we camped overnight and went for a hike the next day before returning to their house.  This gave us a chance to explore parts of the park we had not been to before.  On the first day we all went for a short hike after setting up and having lunch at Aspenglen, a small and attractive campground in the northeast part of the park.  We soon got up into a nice subalpine meadow with nice views.  We then drove up Trail Ridge Road, which is only open in the summer and is the only road between the eastern (Estes Park) and western (Grand Lake) park entrances.  Several miles are above treeline, which is about 11,000 feet in this part of the Rockies.  We watched a herd of elk pass by as we neared the Alpine Visitor Center.  We hiked from the visitor center to the top of a hill, a little above 12,000 feet elevation.  Snowfields clung to the ridges in sheltered places.

The next day the two of us hiked up Deer Mountain, which has an excellent view of a large flat meadow below (Moraine Park) with the park’s highest mountain, Longs Peak, in the distance behind it.  A nice young couple from northeastern Colorado walked most of the way up with us and told us of some good hiking places.