One Ringy Dingy

September 8, 2024 — Day 8

KOA Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada — Struisvogel Ranch, Carrying Place, Ontario

Just a quick travel day today. We packed up and headed down the street to another campground to buy propane. We were down to 29% which is surely enough to get home, but maybe not. The forecast over the next few days was going to be cool and we didn’t want to run out. Paul went to gas up the Jeep (paul here: uhm, get some pizza, I mean gasoline, at City Slice, wait, at Canada Petrol.) Both missions accomplished we headed off to Mississauga where there was a Whole Paycheck Whole Foods where we could go grocery shopping. (susan here: we came over the border with very little food, purchased a little on arrival. We didn’t want to buy much this time either because if we don’t eat it we’ll either toss it or the border patrol will take it.)

We got to see Lake Ontario for the first time. It was, as expected, vast.

We soon crossed over a scary looking but not really very scary bridge just east of the city of Hamilton. There is a wide beach area but there is a tall bridge so tall ships can go under it. They have this cool channel to guide them through, and I guess keep them off the beach.

We soon got off the highway into the bustling city of Mississauga.

That’s a double decker bus. We saw lots of them in Ontario. This was transport heaven. We were about to head into shopping heaven, or hell if you driving something 50+ feet long. (susan here: it was absolute hell.)

We could see that the Whole Paycheck parking lot was, as we expected, jam packed and didn’t even bother trying. We’d planned on parking in one of the other bigger lots. It was well past lunch and we were hungry. We saw an open area in the Walmart lot way in the back corner. So we stopped there and had lunch.

Next up was leaving, which meant exiting through this mess:

We parked where we did because it wasn’t packed. We had space to park. But could we get out!? We hadn’t fully considered entry and exit. Obviously not our best decision of the day. See that white van way over on the right? Susan needed to make the turn before that van and snake down the lane. How did we do it? Susan drove and Paul walked ahead with the radio, being her eyes because it’s really hard to know where the front corners are, and stopping traffic when necessary. At one point she was inching along on a turn less than 15cm away from hitting the Porsche. To the couple in the Subaru that stopped without us asking? We love you! Thank you for being aware of your surroundings! Oh, we did a driver change at the next traffic light, we’re getting good at that.

A couple of hours later we pulled into our accommodations for the night at the Struisvogel Ostrich Ranch.

Susan got out to open the gate.

It was hard to find the place to park. They said we could park on grass or gravel and there were numbered spots, 1 through 5. We found 1 & 2, on bumpy, unlevel grass, so we just parked on the unnumbered gravel pad just across from the metal barn above because the listing had mentioned gravel.

We headed out to a grocery store, which it turns out, had enough spaces to park several Cliffords. We purchased provisions and on the way out, Paul spotted a Bell payphone!

This makes sense since much of the rural US and presumably rural Canada has little cell phone service. But Bell! That hasn’t been a Bell in the US for decades. And look at the phone book, the pages were brown, probably brittle, and Paul wasn’t touching them.

Back at the ranch (Paul has always wanted to say that) we chatted with the owner a bit who was just coming in right behind us. He wanted to know if we found the spaces behind the barn. We weren’t in the way, but the neighbors were being jerks about them being Harvest Hosts. We explained that the area didn’t work for us and that the ground was really soft, he said “No worries. Stay where you are.” The next day we’d learn that our hosts had 70 acres as do the complainers. There’s really no reason for them to be the miserable neighbors that they are. If you’ve watched Clarkson’s Farm you get the idea. This farm is on a smaller scale and without the fame and bank accounts that go with it.

We had the butter chicken and samosas we bought in Niagara Falls for dinner. There was a great bit of golden hour light on the nearby meadow and woods. The farm was beautiful and very quiet. We settled in for a good night’s sleep.

Daily: 323km (200 miles)

Total: 1,069km (663 miles)

Driving km/Day: 268 (166 miles/day)

Overall km/Day: 134 (83 miles)