Ride for Africycle 5.0 Day Six

Look carefully - you can see Toronto if you want to!

Waking to our much looked forward to "Day Off" was a strange sensation. Really, I wanted to ride, but I also wanted to wander around the Park we were in and then I had heard that we were near Fort Niagara which I had seen many times from the Canadian side but never actually been near or in. So I figured some combination of those three things is how I'd spend my day.

A hot shower, fresh coffee and a simple breakfast and then I caught up on the notes I was compiling in my little red Moleskine. Along the way I'd also been reading "The Rider" by Tim Krabbe. I'd not made a lot of progress with the book because by the time I crawled into my sleeping bag, I was simply too tired to focus in the half light provided by my flashlight. So I read a few chapters (it's one of those books that you re-read sentences, paragraphs, chapters over and over again just to really enjoy the brilliance of his writing)

As I walked off to find the beginnings of a trail that led through a wetland I heard that a group had left for Niagara Falls, NY in search of food, bike parts, and a view from the American side of the Falls. I decided to head down to the Lake where a bench that Dave Barber had claimed was beyond awesome was placed with a sweet view of the Lake. I walked there and sat down and wrote stories and a few poems and took in the mellowness of a family playing in the waves below.

After a while I made my way over to the start of the "Nature Trail" and found myself immersed in a beautiful wetland bisected by a dusty trail, rippled with roots and rocks, and all the while I was wondering if perhaps the original occupants had come this very way through the wilderness.

no wonder they stayed ...

I started to get hungry again and was thinking about riding over to Fort Niagara - which I think was about ten km away, so I returned along the same path and found Chris and Paul pretty much ready to go on a ride to the Fort. The Fort has great presence and I was absolutely taken by the amount of original detail still available to be seen and touched.

Here's the entrance:

Inside the barrack house:

The view from the barrack house:

For more images of Fort Niagara please visit my Photobucket page here.
After a thorough, self-led tour of the Fort we biked back to the campsite and enjoyed another astonishing Jerrett-made meal before setting off to sleep knowing that tomorrow we would be returning back to Canada across the Rainbow Bridge.