The Last Summer Adventure

So…we’re off again.

This time we are headed north to a cottage near Burks Falls for a week with our kids. J has already left to pick up R&J at the Oshawa Go station.  They have been in Ontario since last Saturday visiting with his mother in Bellville.  N &M are picking J&L up at the airport in Toronto early this evening and driving up.  I need to tie down the load on the pickup and I will be on my way as well with Liai (the dog).

We have rented a cottage for the week. This cottage is unique.  First of all, its big enough to hold all of us. Secondly, it’s on a private lake so it should be quiet. Finally, it is off the grid, no hydro. there is a generator for pumping water and propane appliances and lights.

We are looking forward to a relaxing and quiet end to our summer.

We’ll let you know how it turns out.

A Sobering Weekend

This past weekend was one that really caused me to stop and think again about life and blessing. Big things were going on in the world. Libya was coming to the end of a bloody rebellion, world finances continued to be in crisis, the stock markets appeared to be free-falling, in Somalia children continue to die as a result of the drought there. All of these things, while very important and frightening seem far away from our little, generally blessed, part of the world.

Sunday changed that as a tornado ripped through the central part of our county landing squarely on the downtown of the county seat, Goderich.  The tornado came ashore from Lake Huron a mere 22km (as the bird flies) from where we were celebrating my father’s 75th birthday. To stay out of the rain, which was thundering down, we were all in the drive-in shed. Since the wind had picked up, someone decided to close the doors. The rain on the tin roof obliterated all other sounds. If the tornado had come our way, we would not have noticed until it took the shed away.  Looking at the pictures coming from Goderich, it is a wonder that more people were not seriously injured or killed

And then Monday the announcement of the death Jack Layton. I had never personally met Jack. For a while in the 90′s we were members of the New Democratic Party and over the years have watched as Jack rose from Toronto city council to leader of the federal NDP and leader of the official opposition this past fall. His initial fight with cancer and his broken hip were reasonably public events. His death surprised me. It had only been a month since he stepped away from his public duties.  There had been no updates about his condition and suddenly he is gone. He could likely win the election today.

We were celebrating a birthday while Goderich was ruined, while Jack struggled through his final hours. It was a good celebration for us as a family. Things have not always been easy in my dad’s 75 years. The things happening around us remind us just how fragile the things we take for granted really are and how quickly our lives can change. We are again reminded about where we find our only comfort.

While writing this post, a truck has come up our driveway pulling a trailer loaded with wood from Goderich. The trailer has a flat tire. I have helped get the tire off and a little later will help these guys get it back on and down the road. My little contribution to the repair of the town.

Happiness and the Journey

All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. . . . The real hope then is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

—Thomas Merton

I borrowed this quote from a devotional article in the Banner (online) by Peter Schuurman.  The article describes Peter’s life as a student, father and husband and finding happiness in all of the busyness of life, busyness that often does not seem to have anything in particular to do with what we think the journey is.

We have been busy these past days. After returning from the aborted walk on the Bruce trail I have been busy with various tasks every day. Today we cut, split and stacked nearly five cords of firewood. (How Canadian can you get?!  Thinking about winter’s cold, in August, with sweat soaking through your shirt!)  Last week a day was spent organizing and sweeping out the shed, another on the barn. I also read a 700 page novel. At the end of each day, I was happy with my accomplishments, but, were they on task or was I just dawdling beside the road?  I have pretty much let Hebrew slide for the past two weeks. Books have arrived that could be read in preparation for next semester. A curriculum needs to be developed for the “ministry” that I will be leading over the next months.

Schuurman argues that there needs to be happiness in life in the midst of the busyness. Being on task all the time is not necessarily  the happy way.  In fact, it may be the wrong way all together since being “on task” gives the impression that I know what the task is or should be.

Thus the Merton quote. God knows what the end is better than I do. Being on task, with my nose to the grindstone gives the impression that, somehow, I can pull myself up to the goal by my own bootstraps. The fact is, I likely don’t even know what the real goal is.

Our View this Past Week

This is the view from the back of our trailer. Spectacular isn’t it?

Mission Aborted

Today dawned sunny, a nice change from yesterday. By 8:20 we were on our way dropping one vehicle at the Cape Crocker Indian Camp and taking the other to the same parking lot we used yesterday. Instead of taking the Purple Valley

Some of the terrain

Side Trail back to the Bruce trail we decided to take another one that went from the parking lot and joined the main trail 4.9 km later.  We did this hoping that the terrain would be a little easier. What we found was a trail that is hardly used at all. We started out in four-foot tall grass soaked with dew. It may as well have been raining.

Liia got the worst of it though.  Down at her level there were plants with little burrs looking to hitch a ride.

Liia getting a haircut

She was a mess. Once we got into the woods again J got the scissors out of the first aid kit and went to work. Some traveler in the future will have a great time trying to figure out what is with the pile of black, white and brown hair sitting beside the trail. We hope they don’t think they have discovered the signs of a new species in the area.

We ended the day at km 34.  We did not follow the trail all day and actually cut off a bit of distance by taking a short cut. We likely walked between 13 and 14 km today but there is so much up and down and trying not to break an ankle that it seemed a lot longer.

We are seriously thinking about aborting this trip. Maybe the Camino just wrecked the Bruce Trail for us. The trail seems to be more and more of the same, and we are really noticing the lack of communitas. We will likely still walk a couple of days but the goal of walking the 170 km from Wiarton to Tobermory is off the table tonight.  The Lions Head trailer park is not helping the situation either with neighbours close on either side and our only shade a sapling.

Another Walk

I’m not sure why we do this to ourselves, but it seems that when we do something once, we need to try the experience again…right away. We’ve done it with the canoe,  the bikes, and now with our feet.  270 km in Spain should have been enough for a season, but for a number of reasons we are out again, this time walking the Peninsula portion of the Bruce Trail.

There are reasons, of course. J’s feet treated her so badly in Spain that she just needs to walk another 170 km to prove that the experience was a fluke. On top of that, I had been assigned, as part of the Pilgrimage course that took us to Spain, the task of developing a pilgrimage route in Ontario, specifically on the Bruce Trail.  I completed that task last week in theoretical terms, but, it just seems right to check and see if there was anything practical about the design.

Today we walked the first 17.6 Km (including the side trail to the parking lot) mostly in wet, misty, rainy conditions.

Typical trail surface...ankle breakers

This walk is way different from the Camino. First of all, there is no one else on it. The trail itself appears to have seen very little use this year. It is narrow forcing single file walking.  The surface of the trail is often very rough.  The Bruce Peninsula Trail Club rates the entire distance from Wiarton to Tobermory as strenuous. They’re right. The big stones in the trail are moss-covered and slippery. No one fell today, but we had some good saves.

Liia was along today. She drank  most of the water that we carried and I think her panting scared off most of the wildlife. She followed J valiantly, but I think that she thought we were just crazy. We almost had to abort the walk when she balked at climbing the spiral staircase at Spirit Rock  With J pushing and me pulling we got her started up. She stopped  part way up, but in the end we got to the top, all hot and bothered (and all smelling like the dog)

We were all glad to get back to our campground, wet and tired. It looks like we will try the next section tomorrow and hopefully over the next week and a bit make it all the way to the end.  We have set up a base in the trailer park in Lions Head so that we have a good bed to come back to every night.

A Job Finished…Well Almost

You may remember my post from a couple of weeks ago, written as we began a construction project to house our hot tub in a more pleasant location. Well the job is virtually finished. Our contractor did an amazing job finishing his part of the project in four days…by himself. We finished putting down the patio on Saturday. I still need to build a flowerbed at the end but apart from that, its done.

We moved the hot tub in today with the help of a neighbor with pallet forks on his tractor. He helped to push it into the corner, where it takes up a little less room than expected.

Last night we invited folks from church to see the pictures of our Camino trip earlier this summer. They enjoyed our new “fire bowl” which allows us to have a fire right on the patio. It was a little crowded for the twenty or so that showed up.  The roof was really appreciated when it started to rain.