Ten little fingers, ten little toes

The accordion and I have been taking a little break. No, there's nothing wrong with our relationship! The decision was totally mutual. We just agreed that we would take separate vacations this year.

Mine was spent camping at Bon Echo Provincial Park. Arietta's was spent in the accordion case on the floor of the room upstairs that never gets vacuumed because it would mean moving the accordion case out of the way.

I'm sure when we get back together it will be as good as it ever has been. But just for now ... it's better this way.

In one significant way the camping trip was accordion-related, in that it was good training for lifting the accordion. Michael and I had been lucky enough to book one of the five walk-in campsites along Lake Mazinaw. To my mind, "walk-in" -- as opposed to "back-country" -- means having to drag your stuff just far enough from the parking lot to make you feel righteous about eating your s'mores. 

Not so.

Had I known how long our little portage would be, I would have packed a lot lighter.

While we were hauling our (admittedly rather large) cooler up a rocky slope, we were confronted on the path by a small boy, heading in the other direction with his father.

"Wow," he said eyeing the cooler, "that's a lot of food."

Blinded by the cold driving rain, teetering on the slick rocks -- even the mosquitoes were hanging on for dear life -- I wanted to say: "How's about you shut your pie hole?"

Instead I put on the insincere smile I give other people's children when they're being loathsome.

"Seriously," he said, "how much are you going to eat?"

His proud papa beamed at him from the path beyond. That's my boy!

Then we passed on our separate missions, we to our campsite miles away, they to the likewise distant privies. Let me just mention that they were in one of the easy campsites, with level access and nearest to the car park. So.

"It was the size of a fridge," we could hear him saying to his Dad as we struggled onward.

But that first day -- did I mention that there was a driving rain, and that we had to put up our tent in gale force winds? And then, when we had struggled it up, getting it and ourselves soaking wet, and nearly being blown off the hillside -- the driving rain was useful here in that it disguised our hopeless weeping -- only then did the rain subside, the wind die down, and a miraculous sunset light hit the top of Bon Echo rock. Because this was the view from our campsite:

So yeah, worth it. Sorry about the sloping horizon line. I must have been off-kilter from schlepping all that stuff.

And, little boy, our butter tarts from the Ivanhoe Cheese Shop were delicious.

When the weather cleared up, this was our real estate:

It's hard to make a campsite look anything but slightly sordid, but you get the idea.  Big, private, on the lake. Fantastic view.

Bon Echo as a tourist destination (I am assuming that the Algonkians did not think of themselves as tourists) began in the 1800s when a canoeing dentist from Cleveland took one look at Bon Echo rock, swooned, and promptly turned it into a wilderness resort.

After his tenure, Bon Echo Inn was taken over by a businesswoman-suffragette named Flora MacDonald Denison, a truly remarkable woman with a major crush on the poetry of Walt Whitman. So major that she imported Scottish stone masons to incise these lines on the face of Bon Echo Rock:

My foothold is tenon'd and mortised in granite
I laugh at what you call dissolution
And I know the amplitude of time.

You can see the inscription through the telescope at the Visitor's Centre; getting it done must have been quite a project. This will give you some idea of the size of the rock. See the little canoe in front?

No? How about now?

Well I'm sure you can see these two boats:

It's easy to understand how people could get obsessed with Bon Echo rock and want to draw it, carve it, paint it, paint on it; take endless pictures of it.

Again with the sloping horizon, sheesh.

Thanks for your patience. Maybe I should start a travel blog ....

*****

The other day my friend Maria read my last blog post and freaked out because it ended on such a note of dire calamity. Did I still have the use of my hands? I had completely forgotten that I left things with me basically bleeding all over the floor. Everything is fine! All fingers and toes accounted for. Thanks for your concern!