I have arrived in Ontario a day before I have to start work and I have been determined to make something more out of my foreign work trips than I usually do. So I hopped in to my ridiculously small hire car, made even more amusing by the fact that everyone else is driving trucks, and drove down to the nearest place mentioned for walking in my Canada Lonely Planet.
The lucky location was "Land 'O' Lakes" (whoever named that place was obviously from Yorkshire). I went armed with my DSLR camera, but quickly found out that for some reason it had rejected my memory card so I could only store around 15 pictures on the internal drive.
Also my work laptop doesnt have any facility to edit photos (well actually thats a lie, I just couldnt be bothered to figure out how), and those swines in IT have blocked Flickr access recently (though for some reason have missed Blogger). Oh the trauma of communication!
After acquiring a map from the provincial park centre (which looked a little like Huddersfield public toilets) I spent the first part of the 12km walk wandering around thinking that the scenery could just be straight out of a Yorkshire woodland. Apart from the effing massive dragonflies that seemed to be everywhere of course.
Just when I was tutting to myself, thinking that this Canada place was nothing special. In fact it was a little like the wood at the back of the house I grew up in. I was startled by a startled deer (startledness all around)!
This is normal fayre in the woodlands of England of course, in fact, due to my chronic unattentiveness, usually I dont spot the deer and somebody has to point it out to me ... then they have to spend several minutes explaining where the damn thing is in reference to that there Sycamore tree in the distance ... then they have to describe what a Sycamore tree looks like ... then maybe I will see it.
But, there was no missing this bugger. Oh no. Thats because it was the size of the 310 double decker bus to Homfirth. Ah so thats the difference between England and Canada. Size.
I couldnt catch the damn thing with my camera, despite the fact it was in my hand at the time (the camera not the deer). But it was around this bit somewhere:
I spent the rest of the walk looking out for bears and suchlike, and panicing about various strange insects landing on me, in much the same way as I used to do with the spiders and cockroaches in Australia.
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3 comments:
Sure it wasn't a moose ?
My brother had a touring holiday in Canada a couple of years ago, parked their hired motorhome on a campsite for the first night and then early the next morning (jetlag), (or maybe just small children), took his youngest (5 years old at the time) for a stroll down to a lake.
While they were stood on the shore with the sun rising a moose appeared on the other side of the lake and swam across to take a look at them, climbed out of the lake about 20 foot away from the pair, our kid didn't know whether to leave his youngest to his own fate and leg it but they stood their ground and the moose walked away - he said it was huge, bigger than anything he's seen in the UK, and it stank.
They went back to the motorhome and got chatting to a old Canadian guy camped next to them, boy was he pissed off when our Ned told him they'd just seen a moose, the bloke had been camping out all his life and had never seen one, our Ned told him they'd only been in Canada for 12 hours :)
This did cross my mind! Apparently it is quite dangerous to come accross a moose and you can land yourself in a great deal of trouble.
I think it was a little too un-moosy to be a moose.
Yes my bro was told later not to approach a moose in the wild but also that the one he saw must have been a young one as they are apparently very curious at the age and will approach humans, it just strolled up to them, took a look then strolled into the undergrowth.
Scared the life out him though :)
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