Yesterday we dropped down into Meldrum Bay, our last stop in what has been a great trip through Ontario.
A great trip, except for the lockmaster at TSW Lock 42. And the flies. And the spiders. And the fire. And the spotty WiFi. And a very small minority of Canadien boaters. And the goose poop. About everything else was fantastic, although a full 50% of us found butter tarts to be disappointingly disgusting.
Meldrum Bay is about as far west as one can go by car on Manitoulin Island and still be on a road. If the road here was in Monopoly, it would be Mediterranean Avenue and houses would cost $50. Mostly it’s a campground.
There’s a store with what supposedly is an LCBO, of course, because there’s always an LCBO even if the shelves are empty. The store in winter, however, basically is Millie’s Haberdashery.
In fairness, there also is a small inn where we had dinner.
The food absolutely was delicious. To honor the end of our roughly 540 nm trip through Canada, we even dressed up for the occasion. That meant Dana looked very nice in a skirt she received for her birthday, and Doug wore his same shorts and flip flops, albeit with a polo shirt. That’s as fancy as we get while living on a boat.
Did we mention spiders? Much like Job from the Land of Uz, our patience has been tested by the hardships confronting us in the form of zillions of them covering Misty Pearl like a bridal veil. (See what we did there?) Spider droppings leave small black dots that resist cleaning. When you smush a spider, it leaves more black dots that resist cleaning. Since there wasn’t much else to do in Meldrum Bay, we cleaned off spider crap and guts.
Day Two saw the small docks fill up with Looper boats. Misty Pearl. Cavara. Compass Rose. Mar-Kat. Miss Norma. Corkscrew. Recess. Oar Knot. Second Wave. The last four are Mainship Trawlers. It was like a Mainship mini-rendezvous. We all hoped to meet up on the shore, but then the rain hit and everyone lost interest in going outside.
The plan is to be in the good old US of A tomorrow. Drummond Island, Michigan. If the weather forecast still sucks when we get up, however, we may get to enjoy Meldrum Bay one more day. If that happens, the blog post will be exceedingly brief.