September 17 - Volksmarch in Renfrew, Ontario

The rain cleared off during the night and we awakened to a clear but cool (around 40 degrees Fahrenheit) morning. Since we were just before fall Equinox the sun was still fairly high in the sky and we figured it would easily warm up to the 50s and 60s during the day, which was just perfect weather for walking. We drove in to Renfrew and parked at the Tim Horton's plus Wendy's combination store across the street from the starting point, figuring that would also be a likely spot for lunch afterwards.

The Renfrew Volksmarch started with a little loop to the west through a typical residential neighborhood before it returned past the main street. What I noticed on that loop and in at least one other neighborhood on the other side of town were so many examples of a 2-story brick house shaped like a cube. They were quite a good size, solid and well kept, and some had added porches, verandas, or side rooms, but the original structure was still clearly a cube. Monika thought they were from the turn of the 20th Century but I thought they would more be from the 40s or 50s era. I have seen some examples of that type of house in the past, but never so many in one place, and I wondered what caused the concentration of them in Renfrew.

Back across the main street, we were routed over to a park with an old mill that was now serving as a museum. I was suffering from museum withdrawal (main symptoms: empty head, trivial thought processes), so I would have gone in if it had been open, which to Monika's relief it was not. At the park we turned right to cross the small river in the center of the towns using a very elegant suspension footbridge. The bridge was really springy and as usual I had fun making it swing and bounce around. There was some kind of dam and possibly a hydroelectric plant directly upstream from the bridge, but if so that must be one of the smallest hydroelectric installations I have ever seen.

After climbing back up the opposite bank we walked a block or two along the main street before turning off to through a neighborhood to reach a pretty little park on the same river, I think, but upstream from the suspension bridge. I thought the stream, as it wound around in its cozy little valley, was quite picturesque. After that park, we zigzagged a couple of blocks on neighborhood streets to reach Ma-Ta-Way Park, where we found some bathrooms in a recreation center and then joined the Millennium Trail, a hiker-biker trail that led us along the edge of town for at least a couple of kilometers. The trail was nice and shady, plus we had occasional views of another stream in the verdant valley below us.

Our route turned back at the eastern edge of town but the trail kept going on as straight as an arrow, and I had to wonder how far it went. It looked like a beautiful trail to bike on and if it is at least 13-15 kilometers long I hope the sponsors will consider putting in a Volksbike there, because we thought Renfrew was a very pleasant city. We formed that impression as our route back went along the main street for a while, and it looked busy and prosperous. I particularly thought the big stone Post Office was a beautiful testament to the stonemason's art, and almost all of the fancy brick and stone storefronts from the early 1900s era had been preserved, giving the business district a charming old ambiance.

On one of the dipsy doodles off the main drag, we detoured through a residential neighborhood filled with early 1900s era mansions. One them had a curved corner on it that was just architecturally unique, and it turned out that the house had a Story, as explained in our walking directions. It seems a husband built a big fancy house for his daughter when she got married, and she apparently moved into it (with a "Thank You, Daddy!", I imagine) and lived happily ever after. Then the husband built an equally big and fancy new mansion for his wife, but she refused to move from their old modest frame house into the mansion! Wow! How many times have you heard of a wife turning down a mansion? Was it maybe that curved corner that she just couldn't get used to? Anyway, he apparently had to go on living in his old house, which must have hurt a bit after dropping a bundle on the new mansion. I love it when clubs put stories like that in the walking directions; it makes the walk far more interesting!

From the business district we recrossed the suspension bridge and continued straight out to the hospital with its helipad before curling back to the finish point. All in all, we both liked this walk and the town of Renfrew a lot. There were, of course, a couple of nutty drivers squealing their tires as they drove around town, but the houses and business district were nice, the people seemed generally friendly, and the chain of parks in the middle of the town all combined to make for a very nice walk.

After a quick lunch at Wendy's, we refueled the truck, returned to camp to hitch up the trailer, and continued on to Ottawa. I inflated the trailer tires to 45 pounds per square inch for the trip in the hope of avoided problems due to underinflation or overinflation, and also kept the speeds down to 56 mph during the hour or so drive. The problem was the conflict between trying to go slow to save the tires and trying to go fast enough to keep up with the flow of traffic. If the traffic really was traveling 60 mph and over, I didn't really feel like I could dawdle along at 55 and block a lane; that would be rude if not dangerous, and I didn't want to cause an accident. But if 60 mph was really too fast for the tires on the trailer, then I would be blowing out even more trailer tires, and they weren't cheap! I was definitely on the horns of a dilemma.

The drive to Ottawa from Renfrew was only about 60 kilometers, and when we arrived we found that the Ottawa Municipal Campground had nicely separated, shaded sites. The location, just a few miles west of town, was ideal in that we could easily drive into Ottawa for the walk the next day. After we arrived we spent a couple hours working on the computers, took a nap, had a light supper, and built a fire for our evening's entertainment. This particular fireplace was a big square of rocks, and I added some loose rocks that I found around the fireplace to build up the rock walls a bit before splitting some wood and building the fire. For some inexplicable reason we had no mosquitoes at all, so we could just sit and play with it to our heart's content.

We finished the evening with Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons" book, continuing through novelistic events at a breakneck pace until it was time to turn off the lights and rest for the night. Whew!