Toronto :: Canada
Getting out of the big city.
Places: Algonquin National Park
Coolest thing I did: Saw both Mooses and Chipmunks.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Everyone in Canada says insert name of place in Canada is the best place to be in Canada in summer.
Thank you Queen Victoria. Due to the fact that Canada, like Australia, never had a real ly pressing need to fight their way out of the British Empire that feisty old battle axe was the constitutional monarch of the country for half a century. For some reason the Canadians think this is a top reason to have a long weekend in late May. Whatever the reason, the words gift, horse and mouth come to mind. This was just the excuse to hire ourselves a compact car (something called a Toyota Matrix) and drive out of the big city to the wilderness.
So after a little trepidation of driving on the wrong side of the car and road, we left Toronto and headed North to Ontarios oldest national park, Algonquin. It seems that most of the park is only accessible via canoe (which is why canoe outfitters are so frequent all the way there) but you can still get a good look at the place off the 60-odd km of highway that makes its way through the south of the park. The added benifit of having a highway through the middle of the park is it attracts the moose. Apparently they spend all winter eating not much and one of their favourite things to do once the snow starts melting is drink salty water. As large amounts of salt is used to melt the ice and snow on the highway this all pools around the edge of the road and every morning the moose just wander onto the side of the road and drink the salty goodness.
Which makes spotting the pretty easy if you get early enough. They wander off for a sleep about mid morning so we only got up early enough on the last day we were there. Everywhere there is more than one car parked on the side of the road there will be moose. We had no problem taking pictures with all the other gawkers and just being generally amazed. I had a vague idea that moose were big but they make cows look like poodles. When they get a bit sick of all the attention they quite often bound through the crowd and over the road. It's only when they are put next to humans that you get an idea of the scale of these things. We didn't even see any full grown males with horns and they were still impressive to behold.
Our other brush with the live wildlife (we did see a whole range of dead animals splattered on the road but they dont count) was with chipmunks. We did one of the shorter walks and it was almost a complete waste of time until I nearly stood on a chipmunk eating some plant or other. They are both small and very quick and surprisingly not too jumpy around people. I think Yvette got annoyed with me singing the theme to the Chipmunks show for the rest of the day (Alvin, Simon, Theo-dore...).
We did see beaver dams and mounds but apparently they don't come out until October. After a lazy summer they come out and work their tails off reparing their dams and probably cursing all the people who have come walking through all summer. And drivers judging from how many flat dead things we saw that could well have been beavers at some point.
We stayed in a town called Maynooth, which had a total population of 200. The hostel was the biggest building in town (there was also a couple of petrol stations, a post office, a shop and a bottle shop) but it also housed the pub and resteraunt. Lets just say it was pretty quiet. Still, the people at dinner who seemed to have only a vague idea of where Australia was is the kind of thing we wanted to see. It was a nice experience but on the Sunday night when the resteraunt closed for dinner at 3pm we started to look a bit further afield. Ending up in the pub in the next town along (the metropolis of Bancroft, 20km away) we found the country way of cooking is what we expected of North America all along; take some food, deep fry it, pour gravy on it, serve it. The place also had that ambience that you can only get from a bar lined by people whose parents were probably siblings, all tanked after a long public holidays drinking, which is something we've been missing in the cosmopolitan cities. It was tops.
On the way home we had a whole day of hire car to use up and nothing much to do so we took a detour to the Bluffs, which are big cliffs just outside Toronto. I'm not doing them much justice, but they are tall, looking over Lake Ontario and very impressive to behold. It's made even more interesting by the fact there is no fence at the edge (I assume because the constant erosion means the fences would keep falling into the lake) so you stand there peering over the edge and going "Woah" in your best internal Keanu voice.
This has inspired us to take more trips away when we are blessed with public holidays only vaguely connected to the thing they are named after (next one is either Canada Day or Civil Day, I can't remember which). There is now one a month until the end of summer and we've got alot to see. I guess it's a bit pointless having them when it's -40 degrees outside. Can't wait.