August 15 2024 St Thomas to Rondeau Provincial Park Ontario



Last night we stayed up late trying to figure out plans for the next few days and things weren't falling into place well. We were looking at trying to go from St Thomas directly towards the ferry to Algonac, Michigan but all the bike routing programs directed us back down to the lakeshore first. Also there didn’t seem to be many places to stay going directly. So we decided to go to Rondeau Provincial Park. The biking app route was about 60 miles. But we cut it down to about 55 miles by taking a little bit busier roads which actually weren't that busy. It was amazing in that it seemed like the whole day was a little bit downhill, as we really moved along for us and we got to the park a little bit after four which is almost a record for us in getting to our destination.
About a third of the way in our journey today we hadn’t seen a good place to stop for a break until we got to a little restaurant/convenience store/gas station. Often in such places you have to be a customer to use the washroom. It turned out they had a whole bunch of different kinds of pie and it was $4.50 Canadian for a piece of pie and only $1 more to add ice cream. For the extra dollar we got to pick a kind from their selection of premium ice cream and they put on two pretty good size scoops! Much better than if we had bought a 2-scoop ice cream cone for $4.25. We had raspberry rhubarb custard and blueberry peach custard pie. For ice cream, “Grammy’s cupboard“ which was excellent!
  A couple sat down at the other end of the table. They have been married for about 15 years but he is 80 (not sure how old she was) and it was a second marriage for both. She was a widow and he was divorced. He was an electrician working on a job for her neighbor next door, who thought, he’s single, she’s single and invited them both over for a meal, the rest is history.
 When we rode around Lake Erie on our tandem 36 years ago, we were amazed to see a lot of tobacco being grown. But now we saw hardly any, and the few tobacco kilns we saw seemed to have been repurposed for other uses. As we neared the park we saw big fields of seed corn.
   At the park, we went swimming for a short time in Lake Erie which was relaxing. Surprisingly, we have done very little swimming on this trip.
    Our campsite had a cord hanging down from a tree branch. Jim could reach the dangling end, and so before dark we used it to hang up one pannier containing our food to keep it out of reach from any creatures overnight.
 At the park registration booth was a sign with a question for the day: what do you call a bear with no teeth? Do you suppose we could think of the answer even though we had heard this question a few weeks before. 



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