Day 5 (Aug 18)

Our evening's labors at mosquito eradication seem to have worked. A really pleasant hike through fields and forest, keeping high. Apples and flowers and snakes and frogs cheer us on. Landowners here are more generous with their boundries:

These guys have the trail right through their front yard, and a nice scarecrow with a pancho. 

A little weirder are these plaque-on-pole contraptions that begin to appear:

Looks suspiciously like trailside advertising. Creepy.

This is nice though, a delightful sun-dappled streamside spot down from Great Falls:

(Great Falls was pretty good, but the picture wasn't.)

After three days in the tent we're running a little low on jerky and have planned a short day into the first cute trailside town, called Waterdown. There's a motel there, plus a laundromat, lots of shops and restaurants, should be nice. We take a short side trail into town and spot a lovely fox staring at us from the bushes. What a fine day.

Here's the motel:

 Can't see it? We had some trouble finding it at first too. Here's a zoom:

Ah yes, there it is... torn to pieces, in the dumpster. We've arrived a couple months too late. Don''t take it too hard, the locals tell us, you wouldn't have wanted to stay there anyway. Nobody else is offering though. Sure, we could go back and camp, but it's hard to be disappointed after dreams of shower and clean clothes. We even try the one AirB&B in town, but no, it's too last-minute. We console ourselves with excellent iced coffee at the Brown Dog.

Ultimately we do get our shower and laundry. We just suck it up, go back to the trail, and happily hike another 10 kilometers (so much for our easy day...) to the next even-cuter town, Dundas, where we're lucky enough to get a room in a nice little B&B called Dundas Glen. The host here is nice, the soap is effective, the food is good, and it's close to the laundromat.