Pakenham (near Ottawa) - Thanksgiving

After a long and often boring (stop and go traffic through Toronto, is there ever a good time?) drive to Mark (my brother) and Emma's place, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend in Pakenham. We took the A-liner as 15 people were too many for their home, large as it is. Not to mention 3 large dogs and 3 cats. The cats stayed out of the way most of the time. The dogs were under foot, or under table anyway, most of the time.
The weather was wonderfully co-operative, only rained overnight on Sunday. This made for some lovely walks as they live in a wooded area with good spacing between their neighbours. We went for long walks both Saturday and Sunday.

Walk up the road to the 2nd pond.  On the walk back a man in an old pickup truck stopped to
tell us he had seen a bear (about 300lbs) in the woods nearby. On the next days walk we saw two
large piles of bear poop.

I asked one of the neighbours, Bill, if I could photograph his sugar shack and he took me through his
property on his ATV to get to it. This is a shot from the top of his hill, looking down the hydro line
to the Ottawa valley. He saw tracks of 3 moose made recently.

Bill's sugar shack. Part of his bush has the hose bringing the syrup down to the shack by gravity but he
also has hundreds of trees with buckets that have to be emptied. Mark has gone and helped in syrup
season and he brings Bill's syrup when he comes to the cottage.

View from the hot tub. The morning ritual was coffee (two cups if someone could be talked into the second pour)
and conversation in the hot tub. No better way to start the day.

No trip to Pakenham is complete without a visit to Scoops where even the dogs get ice cream. This
is Monty (a Codoodle) who licked his like a person, very gently. Caesar (a Burmadoodle), on the other hand,
just gobbled his up like a dog.

After the ice cream we had to walk it off with a short hike to the other end of the village and the famous
5 span stone bridge. Sorry, the fifth span is to the right, out of the picture - too much ice cream,
couldn't aim straight.

And on Sunday, the star of the show, rubbed with butter and herbs, draped in bacon and steamed
in a whole bottle of chardonnay. She was delicious!

Then, on Monday, the ridiculous drive back through Toronto (as we were giving Jason and Chris a ride). Worth it though.