Jim & Jeanette's Travels: Days 17 & 18 – Thursday and Friday, May 28

Parry Sound, Ontario to Peterborough, Ontario – Approx 150 miles

I’m combining days and approximating miles because I’ve been a bit lax in my record keeping while we’ve been visiting friends. But we left Parry Sound around 8:30 and arrived in Peterborough right around noon, so that time frame plus my hasty reconstruction working backwards from gas purchase mileage gives me a fairly good estimate.

Before leaving Parry Sound we had a breakfast of coffee and a pastry at a local coffee shop, then stopped by a high-bay car wash to wash some of the accumulated bugs, mud, and crud off the RV before heading south toward Peterborough. It was good, four-lane highway for the first third of the way, then we were off on the two lane back roads for the rest of the way as we bypassed Toronto and all its traffic. We came down off the Canadian Shield and into lush, green farmland as we veered southeast, away from Georgian Bay. By bypassing Toronto, we missed the opportunity to stop and visit Father Pawel Zboroski, our former parochial vicar (the fancy Catholic name for associate pastor), but we gave him a call and chatted with him for several minutes. Father Pawel is from Toronto, but had stayed in the Denver area for several years after completing his seminary training and ordination in Denver. He returned to his hometown a couple of years ago to be near his family. He is quite a character, and it was great to hear his voice again. He’s been working as one of the assistants at the Cathedral in Toronto, and has just been assigned as pastor at a large Toronto parish.

Our reason for stopping at Peterborough was to visit a friend we met on the Camino de Santiago last year, John Morritt, and his wife Catherine. John and Catherine live on a beautiful 75-acre farm just outside Peterborough, a town of 75,000 which is located between Toronto and Ottawa. John recently retired from ownership of a wine shop, turning ownership over to his two daughters. He and Catherine previously raised and raced a number of pacers, the horses we know from the sport of harness racing. They now have only a single horse, a coop with a half dozen chickens, plus a couple of dogs and several cats which they have adopted as rescue animals from shelters. Catherine, who did not walk the Camino with John, built the chicken coop herself while he was gone. She also has a sizeable vegetable garden, so she and Jeanette were immediate friends and talked gardening the whole time we were there.

We spent Thursday afternoon relaxing around the farm and reliving memories from the Camino. Then John grilled some delicious steaks on the barbeque while we sampled wine from his wine cellar. Catherine made a delicious mushroom sauce to accompany the steaks as well as steamed asparagus fresh from the garden. For dessert, rhubarb cobbler made from freshly picked rhubarb, also from the garden.

On Friday John and Catherine took us for a ride around the Peterborough area, stopping first at a crossroads general store which has been operated by the same family since the 1890s. We then drove up the road a few miles and had lunch at a pleasant country inn on one of the region’s many rivers. Returning to Peterborough, we visited the wine shop and were given a tour by John and Catherine’s twin daughters, Sarah and Jennifer, who now own and manage the store. It’s actually more than a store – those of you who have visited Canada know that beer, wine, and spirits are extremely expensive there. For example, a bottle of inexpensive wine that costs ten dollars in the US costs approximately double that in Canada, and it only goes up from there. So to get around those high prices, many Canadians have started making their own wine. Since few of them have vineyards of their own or access to the different varieties of grapes needed for wine making, shops like John’s step in and provide all the fixin’s for making wine. They sell concentrated grape juice of all varieties, and provide all the facilities for blending and fermenting the grape juice, then for bottling the finished product. All the work is done by the customer (it’s not legal for the shop to do anything other than provide the concentrate and the facilities for the fermentation and bottling). The shop even has a selection of custom labels for the finished product. The process brings the cost of wine down to within what we’re used to paying in the US for reasonable table wine – although it can’t compete with Two Buck Chuck

We later shared dinner at one of John and Catherine’s favorite local pubs, and, mellowed by all the kool-aid we’d consumed, retired to the farm for a heavy discussion of the inner lessons learned from the Camino.