(Apologies to the Beatles for the subject line.)
And speaking of apologies, I feel terrible for getting the name of that fabulous motel in Wiarton wrong: it the WaterVIEW, not the Waterside. And somehow i'm gonna hafta try to get back there.
And to my reader who wonder was poutine was: it's NOT what you guessed, and a whole lot less healthy. It's french fries covered with gravy and melted cheese. Seemingly a local delicacy. A simple recipe for making french fries even worse for you than they already are.
Now that I've gotten all the apologies out of the way, on to the narrative portion of our transmission. We left Wiarton this morning, but not before snarfing some of the rhubarb walnuts home-made muffins at Mimi's Cafe, which seems to be open only a few days a week at the Wiarton Airport. Mimi buys as much locally-sourced produce, cheese, etc as she can, and I was sorry to miss the lunch special, Catalan Gazpacho.
We flew over the Bruce Peninsula -- a place I'd never heard of til yesterday, and absolutely gorgeous with aquamarine water and rock formations that looked like metallic art installations. A weak description, but words fail me. Wow. We pushed on and as the haze and overcast turned into real fog en route to Sault St Marie, we landed at Gore Bay to file an IFR flight plan. The friendly -- VERY friendly -- folks at that tiny, remote airport chatted with us for about an hour as Rob took care of business, offering us tarts from the farmers market and dispensing tourism advice without prompting.
The goal in Sault St Marie (Canada), at least from Rob's perspective, was to get to the Bushplane Museum. In his usual singleminded fashion, nothing would dissuade him, including a late arrival, lack of rental cars and eventual costly acquisition of same, etc. He was determined and we went. Eh. (That's not a Canadian-sounding "eh" with a question mark after it. It's an American, bleh. Take it or leave it and I was happy to leave it.)
But then we began the ordeal of getting out of Canada and into the US (Sault St Marie, Michigan). Fortunately, all I had to do is sit there and not say anything to get Rob more preturbed...what a process. He got quite cranky, discovering three-quarters of the way through some internet-based form that the ONE piece of info he didn't have was at the plane and we weren't, etc etc. It was stressful, time-consuming and generally irritating. Michael and I chatted and made ourselves scarce as there was really nothing we could contribute to the process except aggravation. Finally we were able to take off, fly six minutes to the US, land, and be checked out by a US Border and Customs agent with a sense of humor. "How did the constipated mathematician solve his problem? He worked it out with a pencil." (I'm not making this stuff up here...) Two minutes of examining paperwork and we had the ok to be in the States. (BTW, they did not care about our bananas, grapes, cukes, apples, lettuce etc, all of which we were prepared to toss.)
The last leg took us through an orange sunset in a bank of haze that blurred the demarcation of the sky from the lake. We landed at about eight this evening at Harbor Springs on Lake Michigan, and took a cab to this historic hotel, the Stafford Bay Inn in Petoskey. It's elegant and stately and we're a bit smelly and sweaty and slovenly. Oh well. Speaking of slovenly, while Michael nursed an ish-y stomach, Rob and I walked about a mile to the Bob-In, an ice-cream and burger joint for homemade root beer and dinner. Time to call it a day.
(Photos will come at SOME point, since someone was kind enough to ask.)