Louis successfully got new tires at a Canadian Tire in Kingston, Ontario. The staff tried to hide their horror at the shape the tires were in (they were more than bald – rubber belts were starting to show through where the tread should’ve been) and agreed that we needed a new set ASAP. We waited around until they could fit us in in the afternoon, and left town with a much happier car.
Collecting site #12 was called Happy Valley Preserve, a name which I thought sounded a lot like a dude ranch. Collin thought I was being cynical and said that happy valley just sounded like a nice place to take a hike. Regardless, it was a very nice place to take a hike, and scored a 9.5 – nice trails, good size, lots of hemlocks, beautiful weather and only a few mosquitoes.
We drove until pretty late, stopping only to have dinner in Orangeville (the first time I’ve eaten Chinese in a restaurant in two years and I didn’t throw up! It was a momentous occasion.) Finally, we stopped at a hotel in Stratford, too tired to make it any closer to our last site and worried all the small motels along the way might close before we found a room.
Wednesday morning we set out for our last collecting site, after having breakfast at a Tim Hortons in Stratford. We figured we couldn’t drive all that way through Canada without stopping at the favorite Canadian fast food chain. It wasn’t bad – kind of Panera meets McDonald's.
Our last site was Port Franks Wetlands and Forested Dunes. As the name implies, it was a trail system going through extremely mosquito-infested waters, and a kind of odd climate in which to find hemlocks. Find them we did, however, a small population but enough to gather 20 samples. Collin and I disagreed whether this site merited a 2 or a 6.5 – me arguing for the 2 because the mosquitoes were truly terrible, and Collin for the 6.5 because, he said, bugs were only one category and even if they were abysmal, they could only subtract so many points. We never did compromise on that one.
Crossing the border with our plant samples wasn’t too difficult. We did have to stop and let the agents inspect our car while we waited in the headquarters building, but within half an hour they’d determined that both we and our dead, dried hemlock needles were harmless and they let us go through.
The rest of the trip home went smoothly. By the time we reached Indiana we were both getting pretty bored, and Collin very punchy (he was amusing himself by repeatedly whistling on the pages of our road atlas). It felt like such a long time since we’d been home.
At home we were greeted by a thoroughly pranked house. Our bedroom was elaborately draped in toilet paper, our closets had all been turned around backwards, there were shoes and a shirt in the freezer, and, perhaps most embarrassingly, our underwear drawers had been switched. Whoever the culprits were (at least some of my family must’ve been involved because they had the only key), they did the job very well! After we cleaned up the mess, we happily climbed into our own bed, glad to be back from our grand adventure in the northeast.
