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.