Day 111 – July 23

A clear sky greeted us as we headed out towards Coburg, our mid day destination for the day. My older sister lives there and as our Ontario route is taking a more southerly turn than I had anticipated months earlier I wanted to take advantage and have a visit. Although driving due south and intercepting the 401 east would have been the fastest route we opted to head east, tracking north of Lake Simcoe, through Orillia and then via the rectilinear grid of southerly and easterly roads towards Coburg.

On the way we passed through countless small Ontario towns, many of them not much more than clusters of the ubiquitous brick houses that dot the Ontario landscape. One such town, Ramara, just east of Lake Simcoe, distinguished itself from others along the way by decorating its Main Street with old bicycles pressed into a new life as flower pots.

Re-cycled

In between the small towns were stretches of farmland boasting crops of corn and wheat. It appeared we had to drive to Ontario to find a field of wheat. Go figure. Along the road we stopped at a shop called Primitive Design. What caught my eye was a huge Transformer-like statue in front of the building. We stopped to take a picture and were drawn inside to what was advertised as an 8,000 square foot warehouse. The transformers, made of an agglomeration of auto and machine parts were amazing and set up as a fund raiser for the local volunteer fire department. Inside the warehouse was an array of third world crafts that really defies description. Incredibly large and intricate wood carvings of birds, dragons, lizards alongside stone work, garden ornaments, it just went on and on. The prices were very low. Luckily nothing would fit in the BRT.

Transformational

My GPS got us to my sister’s address flawlessly. My sister was in the middle of a sewing marathon. Although she has been legally blind for many years she has enough residual sight that with aid of strong glasses she can use her sewing machine. What she has chosen to do is to buy fabric and make sun caps for female chemo patients, polar fleece toques for the children of women in shelters and blankets for their mothers. It is an amazing selfless gesture from someone who was not dealt the best hand of health cards herself.

After a couple of hours of catching up we headed east again, working along the #2 highway as it hugged the coast. Our guide books noted only a couple of campgrounds further east of Coburg and we chose Pickerel Park which, as we were to soon find out was located at the end of a confusing maze of left and rights. This was a large park of over 200 sites, and seems to focus on seasonal campers, understandable as I doubt there is much drive by traffic there.

We met a couple with a black labrador retriever who were seasonal campers and who invited us over to their campfire. They lived close to Kingston and like us they were new to RVing, providing us with some common ground for conversation.