Across Canada and back: Parry Sound to Plantagenet, Ontario

My great-great-grandfather built this building, used as a church (where he preached) and a schoolhouse.

He owned this property until he left for the Dakotas

Spotty WiFi the past couple of days so we're finally getting a chance to post again. In spite of the bugs (a recurring theme in these parts!) we have had some great discoveries: just outside the town of Parry Sound, we visited the Humphreys Library, where we found contemporaneous stories of settlers containing references to my great-great-grandfather William Symington, a Methodist minister who started the first church/school in the area. The building he built still stands - and I posed in the exact location my sweet Aunt Grace stood many years ago when she made her discovery! We drove all over the area and found the property he owned - and had difficulty farming - and the nearby lake where my great-grandfather met my great-grandmother, a cook at the local lakeside resort. It's no longer in existence, but stories abound about steamships docking there to disgorge well-heeled tourists.

Lake Joseph, formerly the site of a fancy resort, 1870s style

If it's spring, it must be moose season!

On the road east again, we drove through the Algonquin Provincial Park and decided to stay overnight at a little lakeside campground. Have I mentioned bugs? We were driven inside, and every time the door opened, another hundred or so joined us. It was a full-force effort to kill them all before bedtime, including about 50 that had crawled into Sascha's fur and left her covered with red welts. Poor baby!!
We got up early and hightailed it out of there as fast as we could. Driving toward Ottawa, we came out of woodlands into farming country, and I got my wish to see an Amish buggy going down the road at a fair clip.
East of Ottawa, we took the road adjacent to the Ottawa River towards Plantagenet and Alfred, the little towns where my Hughes relatives lived for several years after arriving from Ireland, and before departing for the Dakotas. No buildings of theirs still exist, but tomorrow we'll backtrack to Ottawa to study some of the archives to learn more about my great-great-grandmother Catherine Cummings, who married into the Hughes family and pioneered in the Dakotas (we found her grave in Walhalla, ND, several days and hundreds of miles ago).