Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Trip to Don's Cottage
Don is one of Erika's trumpet-playing colleagues, and he invited us and our family up to his family's cottage for the weekend. His cottage is beside a lake in the Kawartha region, and what with temperature in the city predicted to reach a high in the 30s, it offered a welcome escape from the heat of the city.

We left sometime around 9:30 and arrived, after a mix-up with the driving instructions, at around 11am. A cool, driving breeze came off of the lake, not only cooling things down considerably, but keeping away any mosquitoes that might otherwise have been expected to have been there.

Erika and the girls had been up here once the year before, and even before we had finished unpacking wanted to head immediately over to the trampoline in an adjacent yard. Don and his siblings have over the years bought adjacent properties along the shoreline, which taken together add up to several hundred feet of lakeshore frontage, festooned with the playthings and artifacts of the various children who have summered up there along with their parents. The trampoline has a diameter about the size of our entire backyard in the city, certainly enough for two little girls to bounce around to their heart's content.

Vanessa and Annie Bouncing on the Trampoline

After the girls had had their fill on the trampoline the next thing was a swim. A dash back to our cabin to get their swim things on and buckled into their swim vests. These would have been required in any event, but the waters were surprisingly choppy for such a small lake. Swimming sandals were also required, as zebra mussels were everywhere, their sharp edges just waiting to cut the unwary foot that might step on them.

Annie in the Swim with Two Flotation Boards

In between swims I got to talking to one of Don's brothers, who was clearly the family's handyman as well as knowing a lot about the area's history. He told me that the originally the area where we standing was swampland, well away from the shores of the original lake. When the Trent-Severn Waterway was created a century and a half ago, dams raised the levels of the lake to their current height, which fluctuate little over the course of the year. He pointed to an island a couple of miles north from us where he said you can still see the stumps of trees that were drowned under the original inundation. This was all originally in aid of the logging trade, where logs could be sent all the way down to Lake Simcoe to the south and west. He also mentioned that in one of the nearby lakes there was a submerged old railway line that comes as close as a meter to the surface of the waters. Apparently the lines sometimes catch unwary boaters, who are often incredulous at what they've just hit: "my boat hit a rail line!"

Soon after Don got their boat out along with an inner-tube type toy and the girls bounced off happily as the boat pulled them and the tube across the waters of the lake. Our dog, Yo-Bob, was very concerned about this apparently very unnatural turn of events, and waded into the water as fare as he dared to bark his concern. The girls laughed and had a blast as they were pulled gently (but not too gently so that didn't elicit the occasional thrilled scream) across the lake.

A Concerned Yo-Bob

The evening meal was a smorgasbord of simple, filling fare, topped off with homemade pie from a local hole-in-the-wall operation that was very, very yummy. Definitely am off the diet for this weekend.

In the evening we retreated to our cabin, where, thanks to satellite TV, Annie was able to watch The Big Comfy Couch on Treehouse TV while Vanessa watched an episode of Goosebumps I had downloaded and put on my laptop. Not exactly rustic, but we were all tired by that point and the bugs had amassed outside as the constant winds from the day died away, along the mosquitoes from the forest just up the road to venture lakeward.

I was the last to retire for the night, staying up to read a few more chapters of the latest Douglas Coupland novel, jPod, before turning in.