Monday, August 14, 2017
We drove toward Riding Mountain National Park. Along the way we stopped in Kenora to get gas and load up on Tim’s donuts. This was a good sized town or a small city. It sits by itself in the southwestern area of Ontario in the middle of a huge lakes area. What a crazy place! Traffic was worse than some cities we’ve been to, we saw a fender bender happen, several near misses, including our own, and a crazy dude waving traffic along. Definitely a tourist mecca.
As we continued on the road we saw a wolf! A real live wild wolf! He was trotting toward us on the shoulder of theroad. There was no time to grab the camera as we passed by. I concentrated on noting that it was indeed a wolf and not a coyote. I learned my lesson on this; always have my camera up front and ready.
For a late lunch we stopped at Gepetto’s, an in-the-middle-of-nowhere place with a lunch shack, shop and little putt-putt course. While we ate we watched Spotted Chipmunks play.
Riding Mountain National Park is a huge commercialized park. It has its own town, a lake and beauqoup campsites. The folks camping at this park were less considerate than in previous parks in that they were louder and stayed up much later; quiet time was not honored very well. The bright spot was that we had neighbors to one side of us that were very nice and we actually visited with them for a little while.
Late in the evening we took a drive and along the way saw a Great Grey Owl! Alan hit the brakes and, lesson having been learned, I grabbed my camera and jumped out to take a few shots before it flew off.
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Tuesday morning we rose very early and headed out for a hike on Kinosao Trail. I had read that the trail was medium in difficulty and only 4km (2.5 miles) long. Perfect. Except. Except that I had misunderstood the trail description. The 4km length only applied to the part that got us to Kinesao Lake. We had to treck another 5km to finish the trail. It didn’t help the situation since my sciatica was acting up. God bless Alan, he put up with my surliness like a gentleman.
The really sweet happening in all of this was we got to watch, and photograph, a pair of loons on the lake.
Once back at camp we both rested.
In the evening, upon the advice of our neighbors, we drove out to see the Park’s Bison. These big animals were in a free roaming fenced enclosure covering about 100 acres. Along the way we saw many Kestrels and on the way back Alan spotted something dark in the brush. He turned us around and sure enough it was a black bear! I managed to get a couple of halfway decent shots of the bear and the Kestrels.
