Blog from The Beach II

New blog.....

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:59:00 -0400

Wel, GC, since so few people are dropping by the website, I have decided to take my blog elsewhere, where some people might actually read it.

I did post this new blog info on FaceBook in the GC group, so that you could find my stuff.

But in case you did not get there....

I have set up a new blog at this address.

http://spikeymom.wordpress.com

The purpose of my new blog is to share with my family and friends the writings that I have squirreled away.

I decided that if I posted them in a blog, everyone could read them and it would be cheaper (read: FREE!) and less time-consuming than trying to get them into a hard-copy book format.

I also wanted to experiment with a new blogging application, because I have not been happy with my numerous experiments with Blogspot. So far, altho' I am just at the beginning of the learning curve, I am liking WordPress very much, and tho' I am making mistakes, I think it is going OK.

You could call these "online memoirs." I will never write a chronological autobiography (*snore*) but all the little interesting or funny or sad epsiodes in my life sure do seem to add up to "anecdotal memoirs."

Many of you will be totally uninterested, and if that is the case, you can scroll at will (and please don't be too hard on me.) :)Some things I post will not be exactly memoirs. I think I have a little 'poetry' (doggerel?) lying around somewhere. And please be reassured that I have printed hard copy of everything, so that all will not be lost if there is some big glitch in the web, somewhere down the road when I am long gone.

Hope you understand that because I am one of the oldest ones in our little group, I am feeling that the time is right to get my words out to those people I care about. So I have given you the link, and I hope that, as the time goes by, you will find something to enjoy.

Your comments/feedback at my new blog will be gratefully welcomed.

OMG, I won!

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:36:00 -0400

A Visit to Big Chute

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:31:02 -0400

On the third day of our holiday, we took a day trip to Big Chute, the famous marine railway on the Trent Severn Waterway. The Waterway in its entirety is a National Historic Site of Canada. (Try googling it.) This is the water route from Lake Huron's Georgian Bay to Lake Ontario, a "small" boater's paradise. It takes one week for a boat to travel this route from one end to the other. Besides being a scenic route, it is also a short cut, saving boaters the time and trouble of doing the Detroit River, Lake St Clair, Lake Erie, the Welland Canal, and the entire western end of Lake Ontario. (This is not a lake freighter route, as you will soon see.) The Trent Severn Waterway has many locks on its route, plus this one marine railway which hauls boats up and down a steep bluff between Lake Huron and the Severn River. We can only imagine how the settlers and the voyageurs portaged over this route.

Georgian Bay and Lake Huron are on the left side of this map.
Honey Harbour is marked by the red star. Big Chute is located just to the right of the red star on this map.
Toronto is on the Lake Ontario shore, at the bottom right. (90-100 minutes to the south.)
The Shield country begins roughly at Severn Bridge, and is marked by huge granite outcroppings everywhere. It covers more than a 1/3 of Canada.

Big Chute is a place that I had always wanted to see, as it is unique. For the first time ever I was only 20 minutes away from it by car. Just had to go see it!
Interestingly Big Chute is also the location of the very first hydro-electric power plant in Ontario. No wonder it is so historic.

Our visit took place at midday on a gorgeous, sunny August day, and we got lucky, as a couple of boats arrived for their trip just as we got there. We got to see the marine railway in use, as it took the two boats down to the lower level, and watched as the empty carriage was brought back up to the upper level. Then we packed up and took Lily to lunch.

There were so many photos that I could not put them in this blog, but you can look at the whole series (I hope you will find the photos interesting) at this URL.

http://gallery.me.com/ebream#100231

Here's a teaser from the series of photos I took. The two boats are getting settled in the railway carriage, preparing to be moved down the bluff.

A Visit to Big Chute

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:31:00 -0400

Honey Harbour Vacation- August 2008

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:34:23 -0400

Welcome to the resurrected Blog from The Beach!
It's been on hiatus for about 10 months.

In spite of all my pre-posting editing, some photos may be cropped when I post this.
They might look wonky and unfinished. (Now you know why.)
You can see the uncropped versions with no comments in this album:

http://gallery.me.com/ebream/100223

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I took my family up north to Honey Harbour, on Georgian Bay (Lake Huron) for a week. This is a scenic village that is a jumping-off point for the Georgian Bay Islands National Park. It is also a major boating centre, as you will soon see.

Like many other Georgian Bay and Lake Huron marine centres, it has always attracted boating enthusiasts who live around the Great Lakes. It is common to run into boating people who have travelled from the Detroit area. Many boaters are driving quite large rigs. This year perhaps there were fewer boaters than in past years, as a result of the high price of fuel everywhere in Canada and the USA.

We stayed in a family-oriented small resort that suited our needs perfectly.
It was very close to the village of Honey Harbour, whose docks we could see across the water. We could drive there in a minute or two, or if we'd had boat, it would have been as well. But i was able to walk into the village in about 8 minutes or so, walking slowly on a hot August day.

Here is the sign at the entrance to the resort. Blue Water Resort has about 9 cottages
(cabins) for rent, and also has a campground that accommodates about 7-8 trailers (permanently stationed there) and about another 7-8 tent sites (transients.)

After the sign, we drove in the Blue Water Road from the highway, where the above sign was located.

...which brought us to the heart of the resort....

After checking in, we drove to our cottage....which was a classic Ontario cottage..3 bedrooms and a nice flat deck.

We were very lucky to have booked the best week of the summer: warm sunny days, perfect for swimming or touring around, for hanging out on the deck. We enjoyed eating our fresh corn and BBQ burgers under the evening skies while sitting out here.

On the first full day, I walked into the village of Honey Harbour, and bought freshly baked goodies at this bakery. I loved the village, tiny as it is.

Across the street, I enjoyed looking over the harbour from the government dock.
In the back ground, you can see the Blue Water Resort across the water..look for the green grass, and the flag, in the very centre of the photo. Now you can tell how close we were (by water) to the village of Honey Harbour.

Guess what? Champlain was here!

That's the supermarket/hardware store in the background, where we were able to buy same-day-picked fresh corn each day. We ate a lot of sweet corn (delicious!)

We were treated to some of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen, because our first three days were perfectly cloudless.

We went for a leisurely walk to a nearby marina, using a trail through the woods that brought us out on their private road.
One thing we learned was that every marina (and there are more than a few in the area) has a little well-stocked store, and most of them have restaurants, ranging from chip shacks to very nice caf�s. (We tried out several.)

Lily had a great time digging in the sand.

We also put her to work cleaning up after us......(just kidding, folks!)

This was a very kid-friendly place.All the kids had a great time together.
Miss Lily is the tiny one, of course.

We had such a lovely waterfront to enjoy.
Here it is in early morning. I love the long shadows.
This shot is looking straight across to the government dock.

Here it is again at a different time of day.....evening at the boat dock.

The beach ...and the swimming raft.

Blue Water Resort welcomes the boaters with this rock-based message looking down over the dock.

And here's another outing.....by the dogs..having a pee break.

There's more to come in another blog. Check back later in the week for the next instalment!

Link to the website of Blue Water Resort:

June and Andr�, such delightful hosts, would love to have you visit their website.
They have thoughtfully included a nice little map to show you where they are located.

http://www.bluewaterfamilycottages.com

A few changes underway

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:03:54 -0400

I have removed the Forum from this site for the time being.
I've reinstalled the Guestbook to see if that will be used more.
Only a very few people were using the Forum,
and it is possible that it was too difficult to use.
Or not. Maybe everyone has just lost interest.
(Looks like it from where I sit.)

From the Home page menu, I have also removed a number of pages
that had outworn their usefulness.
Within the week there should be some new Clack to post.

Gardener's Lodge, Halifax

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:16:33 -0400

Here's one of my favourite photos from my trip to Nova Scotia.
This large dwelling is the Gardener's Lodge, in Halifax. It's about 100 years old.
It was designed by my great-grandfather, JC Dumaresq, and is still in use today for its original purpose: it is the house allocated to the Head Gardener of the Halifax Public Gardens. I fell in love with this house; it is so large and elegant. At the back, it is surrounded by greenhouses, where the young plants for the beautiful gardens are raised. I photographed the house from its other three sides, standing in turn on each one of three corners of the intersection where it is located, across the street from the Public Gardens.
I left the pedestrians in the photo (instead of cropping them out) just to show the scale of the house.

My grandmother's house in Halifax

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:04:15 -0400

The first stop in Halifax (in late May) was a visit to the house that was built for my grandparents. The architect, S.P. Dumaresq, was my grandmother's brother, and he designed this large home for the large family that was to be raised here: ultimately six children. The original address of this house was 102 Oxford St.
It is still a landmark house.

The house was completed in the mid-spring of 1910, and three weeks after the family moved in, on April 21, my mother was born here.
I visited this house with my cousin Debbie (her mother, my aunt, was the last child, and was also born here.)

Our tour guide in Halifax was my mother's first cousin, Phil, who appears in these photos. He is 91, and the family's prime genealogist. Phil also an architect, is the son of SP. Phil showed us every building and monument in Halifax that was designed by the four generations of architects in our family who have left their permanent mark on the city.

Exterior views of 102 Oxford St. and a few looks at 96, which SP designed for his own family, and which is the house where Phil grew up.

More Halifax pix

Mon, 28 May 2007 21:58:45 -0400

The view from Citadel Hill , looking out over the old Town Clock. It was built looking down to the parade square, The men showed up late for parade, so their colonel had the clock built so as to be seen from the parade square, meaning that no men could claim they didn't know what time it was.
Both the clock and the Citadel are national heritage sites.

The building in the above photo is a federal Government of Canada building, and the engineer who directed the restoration and renovation (which is exquisite) is our cousin Marc Dumaresq ( one of Phil's sons) We were treated to an Insider's tour of the interior ( got great photos) and espcially of the stunning atrium. Had to sign into this building and wear badges. The walls are covered with the awards this restoration project has won.

Below we see Phil enjoying himself enormously as he gives us the tour of the old fort, the Citadel. This fort governed the approaches to Halifax from the rear, which is where the Americans were thought to be likely to try to attack. The sea approaches were already virtually impregnable, due to the fortifications on the islands that guarded the entrance to the harbour.
Today the noon cannon is still fired daily even as it has been fired every day for more than a hundred years. In the photo you can see that these seaward looking walls are thin, whereas the walls at the rear of the fort are many times thicker.

102 Oxford St, Halifax

Mon, 28 May 2007 15:57:15 -0400

Libby and Debbie with Cousin Phil, in Halifax, Friday May 25th
This house designed by my great uncle (Phil's father) Sydney Dumaresq, and the family moved in just three weeks before my mother was born in this house. We were lucky enough to get inside (I took photos)
Our Cousin Phil is 91 and can run rings around us in terms of energy.He has worn us out with his jam packed schedule!!
You can see from the photo that spring is about 3 weeks behind Toronto. Tulips in bloom and also forsythia, but lots of trees are still bare. On Saturday the temp went up to 30C and today it was 13C!
Beautiful weekend, sunny every day, rain today but easy, easy driving.
We are seeing so much and having a great time, having been entertained by all the cousins who were as thrilled to meet us as we were to meet them.