Thursday, May 7, 2009

Overnight Trip With Matty

Last Friday Matthew and I decided to play hookie for the day and go up to the cottage - just the boys!

We arrived after a very enjoyable 3 hr road trip listening to tunes and stopping for lunch in Fenelon Falls and food shopping in Kinmount.

After much persistence Matthew convinced me to delay my plans for painting the bathroom and spend part of the afternoon on a mountain bike outing in the woods. We got into our billy boots as things were pretty wet and proceeded to walk, drag, crawl and as necessary carry the bikes through the forest behind our cottage, over logs, through the creek and up the hill to the trail.

In the forest behind our place there is a series of trails - I think mostly used by ATVs, these are great for hiking and biking - although we do have to trespass onto neighbouring land. 
(This summer we will make a point of meeting all the landowner and hopefully getting permission to hike and bike)

After a really nice ride along the trail, past a wet land where a geocache** is located, we finally emerged from the forest into a dry scrubby "tundra like" environment with lots of beautiful lichens and juniper bushes.  Here we turned off the trail and onto another loop that was created as a dirt bike track - we decided to explore this as a neighbour mentioned it last summer. Turns out this is a much longer loop than we anticipated and really took a lot of energy to cycle around. Halfway back Matthew's chain fell off requiring some messing with but we finally got going again.

Heading back we came upon a rabbit next to the trail which stood it's ground until Matt  who was thrilled to see it got to close.  We took a shortcut home through our neighbour John's property which leads directly from the trail back to the road instead of trampling through the back of our property again.

We were both pretty exhausted but this had been a fine adventure on a beautiful spring day.... of course the bathroom still needed to be painted!

On our way home Saturday along our dirt road we saw a Wolf running ahead of us as well as two deer along the highway - each visit to the cottage has provided some great and unexpected wildlife viewing!

**We are very near the geocache capital of Canada - Gooderham

The sunset - not a chimney fire!!

1 comment:

  1. Phil, I thought after all this time I would post a comment to let you know I know.
    I've been enjoying following how you have been with this cottage or shall I say dream? I really get your love and passion for this and your family. It is really evident.
    Thank you for sharing yourself with us.

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