We woke early again so we could go out at first light to try and catch the sunrise. Unfortunately, the conditions weren't quite right and there was a lot of cloud cover, so there was no sunrise to be seen. Never mind, we took a few pictures of geese, ducks, gulls and a heron and headed in for breakfast.
Skip this paragraph if you're not into photography... Stu's had a spot of bother with the battery grip for his new D90 camera. It's supposed to enable him to have two batteries in at once, thus doubling the time you can use it for. Instead, it seems to fail completely in slightly chilly conditions, rendering two fully charged batteries completely useless. Rubbish! Needless to say the last couple of mornings at 6.30am when we went out to watch the dawn over Peninsular Lake and his camera completely failed he was not impressed. Anyway, I digress...
We finished packing, checked out and hit the road, back into Algonquin Park. Our first stop was the very beautiful Smoke Lake. We stopped along the shore to take some pictures and then took the Hardwood Lookout trail, a 0.8km loop up to a different and very lovely view of Smoke Lake from a clifftop. This trail was considerably shorter than the Mizzy Lake trail on Saturday, and much easier going - paths all the way, although quite steep at times.
We popped to the Portage Store and did a bit of postcard and souvenir shopping, followed by our picnic overlooking Canoe Lake. I'd have loved to take a canoe out and paddle around for a few hours but sadly we didn't really have time, but we should hopefully get another chance later on our trip. We did however meet a couple of management consultants from Coventry who are working in Toronto and had gone fishing in a canoe!
We stopped at Algonquin Art Centre, which had some lovely stuff by Canadian artists, mostly depicting the magnificent Algonquin Park scenery. A few photos of another lake - Found Lake next to the art centre- before moving on once more to our final stop in Algonquin, the park Visitor Centre. We didn't spend long there but it was well worth the visit, with some very interesting exhibits. There were some very well-done wildlife scenes using stuffed animals - I'm not normally a fan of taxidermy but doubtless in this day and age they had only used specimens that had already died, and these were a far cry from the horrible ones you see in old museums with bulging eyes and looking very unnatural and dead. The exhibit included a couple of moose, which showed the huge scale of them. Quite impressive creatures. I spoke to a couple who had seen one swimming in a lake the previous day, so I'm still hopeful we might get to see a real one at some point.
Finally, we bade farewell to Algonquin. What a beautiful place. If we'd had more time we could certainly have spent a few more days there, so hopefully it's somewhere we may return to some day. We followed Highway 60, which leads towards Ottawa past yet more stunning views of lakes, and we allowed ourselves one more lake stop before heading for the city. We got to Golden Lake just before sunset and figured it'd be rude not to stay for the show. Needless to say it was stunning and many photos were taken.
When we realised some people in a camper van parked nearby were enjoying the sunset in a rather different way, we decided that was our cue to leave! Good thing we did too, as we knew we needed to refuel the car to get us to Ottawa. We pulled into a gas station in the town of Eganville and filled up shortly before 8 - as soon as we had gone she shut up shop, and we didn't see anywhere else further along the route. Lucky escape there!
We finally arrived at our hotel for the next two days, the Crown Plaza in Ottawa, at 10pm. We quickly changed and headed down for a drink and nachos (since we hadn't had any dinner) in the hotel bar. Unfortunately, I'd woken up this morning realising I'd received a few nasty mosquito bites while on the Mizzy Trail. I tend to react badly to them and I had 4 massive lumps - on my left elbow and shoulder, below my left ear and on my left temple. The nearer we got to Ottawa the stiffer my left arm became, and when we arrived I realised my arm had swollen up like a balloon :(
It became so uncomfortable throughout the evening that we had to take a quick walk to a 24hr store to buy pain killers. We finally got to bed about 12.30am and I prepared for an uncomfortable night's sleep.
Still, aside from the poorly arm we'd had another lovely day.
Dx
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