(Godfrey, Ontario, Canada)
While I have not posted for a few weeks, there have certainly been some travel-related developments.
Long-time readers of this blog might recall that I intended to visit Memphis, Tennessee at the beginning of my 2014 year of travel. However, an unexpected ice storm in Tennessee prevented me from taking my connecting flight from Chicago. From time to time since then, I have thought about trying to visit Memphis again.
Those efforts intensified recently and I was trying to use some Air France/KLM (“Flying Blue”) frequent flyer points to make the trip for free on one of their associated airlines. I got as far as selecting the flights but unfortunately a technical issue prevented me from making the booking online. Before calling the customer service line, I noticed that Flying Blue had some promotional offers for international flights from Montreal: for a very limited time, the number of frequent flyer points required was reduced by 30%! As a result, I had enough for an overseas trip this fall!
I had to make a very quick decision – within 3 minutes, I had selected where I was going and when I could fit it into my schedule. It’s quite exciting to have an adventure take shape so quickly and spontaneously. You will be reading more about this mystery destination in the very near future!
In the meantime, we recently spent some time back on the K&P Trail. We are slowly making our way by foot from Kingston to Sharbot Lake on this former railway line: I first wrote about it in a 2014 post and revisited it in a 2015 post.
On this occasion, we started just south of the hamlet of Godfrey and, after passing through that crossroads, made our way through some increasingly remote terrain. At one point, we heard a very loud and sudden noise that sounded like it was about 20 meters away. At first, my wife thought it sounded like an extremely very large bird taking off from thick underbrush…but we did not see anything flying away and there are certainly no condors in this part of the world. We decided that something very large must have fallen, just out of view but very close by.
On our way back to our car, a cyclist stopped to tell us something: he was a regular trail user and, in the last week, he had two encounters with a mother bear and her cubs in that very spot. He said that he made a lot of noise and the bears did not bother him. Needless to say, we were slightly rattled by realizing that we might have just passed by a protective bear in the wild. Just in case, we grabbed some large sticks and walked back to Godfrey at a noticeably quicker (and louder) pace!
We decided to chill out with some ice cream at the Godfrey Social Club. We told ourselves it was just to cool off after walking in the hot sun, but it probably was also a reaction to our unintended close encounter with wildlife.