Day 3 (Aug 16)

Quick breakfast and goodbye to our Canadian pals. We're eager to join the Bruce Trail and get up on the Niagara Escarpment...

The Niagara Escarpment (folks around here just call it "the Escarpment") is a huge cliffy formation that stretches from Wisconsin, through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across southern Ontario, back into the USA at Niagara Falls, and eastward past Rochester to Watertown. It's made of tough dolomite that stood pat as everything else around eroded away, long ago. Now it's a great set of cliffs. The Bruce Trail pretty much follows the path of the Escarpment from Lake Huron down to Niagara. We'll only be enjoying the southern end of this.

We scoot past a maze of derelict winter sports machinery to join the Bruce Trail at the west end of Kelso Park, and slowly ascend the back edge of the cliffs.

Here's Lake Kelso from atop the Escarpment - nice! Our campsite is out of frame to the right. You can see noisy Highway 401 in the distance.

The top is full of trails, including mountain bike trails. Lots of bikes up here. Some have numbers on the front, maybe it's a race? The bikers are very polite in the mountains (much more so than in Toronto.)

Following the Escarpment south, after a brief road walk, we come to Rattlesnake Point. Nice pleasant hiking and fine weather. No rattlers to be seen but some thoughtful person left us a paper cup full of gummy worms.

We're a little weary after our first real up-and-down day of hiking without a bus, and a bit of rain is sneaking up on us, so we find a cosy bed of needles in a pine plantation and sit out the weather in the tent reading a battered copy of Anna Karenina we got on Bloor for only one Canadian dollar (a.k.a. Loonie.) Long, dilapidated books are best for this sort of trip -- they're going to fall apart anyway so we're not shy about ripping out a few chapters so we can both read at once.

Good night!

P.S. - It looks like the posts that I've written from my phone are all messed up... I'm trying to fix them now that I'm at a semi-decent computer in Hamilton.