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.

[buster]

The River, the Park, and then the Bike Path All the Way

We had finished at the eastern end of the Crawford Rail Trail, so we started today from that spot and zigzagged the streets east and south to Brinton Carpet Park which surprisingly was actually covered in grass.

But I have to comment on the neighbourhood we walked through to get to the park which was right out of a 50's movie. It was wonderful. The lots were large and tall trees could be spotted here and there in back yards. The gardens were bright. And the houses were a total mix of styles and I assume value, but all were well cared for. Probably most lots had different builders back then. Still, as a neighbourhood it had both variety and continuity. It appeared to be a set of houses where the neighbours were connected, which of course I cannot know. But to me it felt comfortable.

It seemed the opposite of the newer developments where lots are filled to the maximum with giant similar houses, and if you stand between the houses you can touch both walls. And the passersby here said hello as we met on the sidewalks, and that doesn't happen everywhere in our city. These streets are one of Peterborough's pleasant hidden places.

So we crossed Carpet Park diagonally on grass and stepped onto another trail with trees with, in this case, a river beside it. (I'd like to say it was charming, but men aren't allowed to use that expression.) But this very spot has significance for Bill and me because from somewhere near here we took off, downstream, on the first day of our long canoe trip all those years ago. We ended up camping, cooking, and sleeping in a farmer's field with cows our first night, which really wasn't much of a problem as long as you watched where you stepped. And five days later, as we canoed into Lake Ontario, we had covered the river system from Peterborough to the big lake.

Not surprisingly, we reminisced about that day forty years ago, and stared at the fast flowing water.

We did chat with a man, though not with his dog, who had lived here all his life and loved it. He told us of fishing from the shore with friends on the weekend when he was a youngster. It was obvious this area was not just where he lives. This is his home.

But we had to get to the other side of the river, and used the boat lock just south of Landsdowne to do this, climbed up the steep bank on the other side, and turned left onto Whitla, crossed at the light and walked into the grounds of the Peterborough Naval Station expecting at any moment to be surrounded by rifles.

It was silent. We walked through the mostly unused horseshoe pits, and saw an orange fence that cut us off from our destination, Beavermead Park. We did find one friendly, narrow opening and going through meant we saved a bucket of steps, rather than travelling the long way around on roads. And fortunately we found shade for walking on one side of the soccer fields, saw soccer coaches putting youngsters through vigorous drills and we also saw a friendly bench, also in the shade, that looked out over the water.

I immediately took two pain pills because of my leg, we ate two of Bill's cookies, and we talked of the time we canoed through the Lift Lock as the solitary water craft in an otherwise empty tub, and then paddled across the blue waters of Little Lake, again many years go.

Today we saw kayakers, little kids with smiling parents, people obviously born in other regions of the world, and a very large osprey. It felt as if the world isn't falling apart.

So we continued, following the Rotary Greenway Trail and it was mostly pleasant rather than exciting. We passed the Canadian Canoe Museum, which has Canoe rentals, crossed over the lock, went through Rogers Cove and headed north on streets for about three blocks and then were back on the trail. (I mention these places because readers may have been there at one time or another.)

We could have stopped for a draught at the Ashburnham Ale House, sat outside, and watched the world ride or walk by on the trail, but we still had distances to cover on old legs. Wisdom prevailed, and reluctantly we continued north, finding more and more friendly benches the farther we went. We both liked this trail, but each of us had ridden it many, many times. It was like having an old friend who is pleasant to be with, but not likely to come up with an idea we haven't heard before. Although this isn't true with Bill, who often has outlandish ideas bursting from him that no other human would dare spout.

And the car at our hike's finish was at Nicholls Oval Park, where we saw the setting up for the weekend music festival. We shared some sadness because we only had one more hike to finish to complete the loop back to Trent, and because we couldn't afford to have a music band to greet us when we arrived. This meant we had to go with plan B, which was to have my cousin May play the accordion as we took our final steps. I was a shame though that she could only play religious music.

[buster]

Before the Final Section Begins

The final walking section would have to wait a bit because other things were scheduled for the following week. Really though, neither of us was in a hurry to complete the hiking circle. And the final section would be straight and one of the shorter hikes, so not very exciting. But we would complete the circle, so the final score would be Bill and Harry 1, Magellan 0.