My mom and I just got back from a trip up north to visit our cousin. She lives in Muskoka, which is Ontario's premier cottage country. Martin Short has a cottage in the next bay and Goldie Hawn has one down the lake. My cousin's family was one of the founding families in the area and they had a prime piece of real estate, much of which has been sold off now, but my cousin still has the house that was built for her mother, and one of the only natural beaches on the lake. She spends the winter in an apartment in the nearest town, but now that her mother has passed away, this is the last winter she will spend in the apartment, she goes down to the house almost every day to check on things and give the dog a good run.
We went out on the ice in the bay. this was my first time out on the ice. so weird to walk out on the water further than you have ever swimmed. so weird to see trucks out on the water, and the ice fishing huts! kinda scary when there were big cracks (long, not wide) in the ice and my cousin felt it would reassure us to say "see? look down this crack, you can see how thick the ice is!"
This is my cousin's house. The people who bought the big house run a cottage construction company, so that is their barge for bringing stuff out to construction sites. at the moment they just drive equipment across the ice, or use snowmobiles
Here's the point, see how far out we walked? don't worry, the ice was more than three feet thick.
The intrepid explorers! my mom and cousin and Beau, the poodle. This is pretty much the extent of the pictures because i handed the camera over to my mom and the wrong button was hit, and then it was so cold out (-17C, -20 something with the wind chill) that the camera froze on the close up setting, so we have a bunch of pictures like this:
But, I did manage to get a semblance of a picture of the wild turkey tracks frozen into the ice on the laneway. There have apparently been herds of wild turkeys roaming the countryside all winter!
They ran along the side of some snowmobile tracks, so at first i thought they were a new kind of tred that had an arrow indicating which direction the machine had been heading in, all the better to find a lost snowmobiler. Then my cousin told me they were from the wild turkeys, right about the time their track ceased to be in line with the snowmobile's. I don't think I would like to encounter one of these turkeys, these footprints are about the size of a CD! We also located the fox's winter den, and saw deer tracks out on the ice.
All in all, a very successful winter adventure!
4 comments:
I actually really like that blurry one!
Ah, Muskoka. Blue Castle, and all that. It always blows my mind that it's real and not a made-up place.
That blurry picture is really cool, actually. I like it a lot.
Seriously, some day I'll have to see Muskoka. I'm always reading about the area (particularly in The Blue Castle).
Wow. Ky and I made the exact same comment simultaneously. Can you tell we spent yesterday working together?
you guys will have to come out here and visit me one summer and we will go up to muskoka and the bruce penninsula. i actually have planned out where i will take you already!
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