Saturday, October 1, 2011

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.

3 comments:

  1. just discovered your bicycle blog- this is great- and the photos are wonderful!

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  2. hi kathe w.! thanks for visiting. i'm slowly sharing the stories and pictures of the ride i did this summer with the ride for africycle riders around lake ontario. this is my second time round so if you check in the blog postings on the right in july 2010 you can see the first ride. all the other postings are about the smaller rides i do around the peterborough region. nice to meet you. steven

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  3. Steven, I'm SO enjoying this journey! Haven't had much time recently to read, but I'm trying to catch up. I still have never been to Sips, even though it's about a 3 minute drive from my house. I was just there this past weekend snapping some photos of the marina across from that plaza...

    Rick

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