Day 11 (Aug 24)

The cheerful sound of bird-repellant gunfire wakes us through our earplugs. A really lovely morning on the trail. The spider webs are thick with dew and the mosquitos dance like little fairies in the sunbeams.

Pass through the great little homestead of the Van Den Elzen family:

They drive by (in a van, of course) and wave. Seem like nice people. A good crop of strawberries ripening and some appealing goats.

An easy jaunt through the Ball's Falls Recreation Area, with a cute little cliffside historical village with an old mill, blacksmith, church etc. Another place to get married. We're already married but for anyone who's looking to, Niagara wine country seems to have you covered.

Another well-timed winery, Flat Rock, greets us for lunch in their neat octagonal tasting room:

Delicious stuff. And just before heading back into the woods another excellent winery peeks around the corner, Sue Staff's:

12 wines tasted in all, a very winey lunch! Hope we don't run into any sinkholes.

Deb rescues a young orphan ear from a broken stalk of a trailside corn field, and we munch it raw during our afternoon heat-dodging siesta. There's still a lot of heat waiting for us when we resume, though, and it's a sweaty slog to the next likely camping opportunity in Short Hills Provincial Park.

Cousin D's reassurance notwithstanding, we're aware that all the camping that we've done since the paid campground at Kelso has been unauthorized. It's also clear that these are rules very much observed "in the breach" so it hasn't been too worrisome. We've kept our campsites away from the trail and off private land, and it's been fine.

Here in Short Hills, though, the regulations are vast, specific, and clearly posted, listing fines off 100 to 300 dollars for a wide variety of infractions, camping among them. But this place is huge. There's no way we could make it out by nightfall, and nowhere to stay on the other side if we could. Nothing to do but set up as discreetly as possible, far offtrail in a less busy part of the park, and spend a nervous night being chided by the snorting deer whose weedy bed we're borrowing. Hopefully they won't rat us out to the park wardens.