A Peterborough Walking Tour for Old but Adventuresome Hikers

[Jason]

"I don't follow. You had phones or you didn't have phones? "

We have phones for emergencies, but not for finding our way. We have to find our way using the position of the sun, our instincts, or our luck, or a paper map we have, just as we did 40 years ago.

Gotcha'. Sorry, I'm one of those who likes to follow along as I read. When I'm reading fantasy or historical novels, I do the same thing. Maybe it's because I can't depend on the position of the sun, instincts or luck. If you can still find a paper map, they're good, though. I'm old enough to have used maps during long drives. But honestly, I'm glad we're beyond that, even if it's nice to get away from looking at a phone for a while. It's nice to listen to music while walking, obviously I mean when you're alone. It'd be downright rude to do that when you're with someone.

[buster]

Searching for Greenery, City Streets, and the Crawford Rail Trail

We hope to end today's trek where the Crawford Trail crosses Monaghan. This gives us a good place to drop a car for our planned end point, Lansdowne Place. And sadly this leaves us with only two days of the route to finish back to Trent, and it's not as if I can say, 'Let's do this again in five years.' My body does not keep up with my aspirations.

We dropped the endpoint car and headed northwest to where we had finished day 3, and it was a worrisome drive because it seemed much farther than I thought it was going to be. Houses and stores flashed by as we drove to the start which was a long way to reach.

In fact it proved to be a perfect length, and that may be the result of my slack body relearning how to walk. This was, after all, our fourth section.

As I write this I have to do something I'm not happy to do. I have to praise Bill publicly for the genius map reading skills he has that not only found, but linked in an almost continuous route parks, paths, woods, and lovely tree shaded sidewalks down towards Costco. His luck ran out when one of his adventures took us to a tall Frost Wire fence with barbed wire on the top. This was in fact a map error. And it wasn't ultimately inconvenient.

To this point of the morning, the unpleasantness was limited to a section of the Parkway with its traffic and noise, but we reached, unscathed, after walking through the Costco parking lot, The Crawford Rail Trail, and we headed east.

For those who don't know it, the trail is tidy, arrow straight, paved, and in some ways a bit boring. There is no chance for us to get lost, which is a favourite pastime for us, and people seemed in a hurry and uninclined to chat. But it did get us to my car, where we ate Bill's freshly baked sourdough bread with jam and continued our discussions about the ecological collapse of the world, or the fires, or the loss of insects, or the paucity of fish stocks in the ocean, or the possibility of the gulf stream altering, or the floods in St Catherines or Montreal.  Next walk we can discuss the incredible lack of water in the Colorado River, which we have both camped near, and the emptying of the world's aquifers, and the rapidity of the recent changes.

I have been surprised how much of the natural world you can find in a loop around our city, or maybe Bill can find. But you have to look for it. And on a path in the trees of a forest today we met a lovely lady from Birmingham England, who walks every day, and was happy to chat. With the leaves and branches over our heads we were encouraged to converse and share, but we were in a little island of the natural world, not, say, in a crowded city centre. The world is different in the world our ancestors inhabited. And they did it without phones in their pockets.