Hamilton, City of Waterfalls

 I wake at 3.30 but manage to drift back for another hour’s sleep. I calculate this to be 8.30 and 9.30 UK time, and think that’s as good a time adjustment as I’m going to manage for day one.

We have a look around our basement apartment, which is very nice and I will describe more fully in a later posting as there are a lot of things that are different to UK housing that I think are worth writing about in some detail.

I read the instructions on the coffee machine and manage to make two cups of coffee and we unpack. Then we walk round to Mike’s flat for breakfast. It is really hot, but what hits you is the humidity. And the size of the robins here. They are huge. 

Mike seems surprised to see us, even though it was the arrangement we made last night and he has two fridges groaning with food that needs eating, whereas we have nothing at our place. Vera makes scrambled eggs. 

The eggs here have white shells unlike the brown ones in the UK. I just love noticing these small differences, though I’m sure that when I was a child eggs were white in the UK. When did that change....and why?

We log onto Mike’s WiFi, which he didn’t know he had and alarms him as it involves touching the router to read the passcode, and it might never work again. This leads to a technology discussion and audit. Mike would quite like to be able to see Facebook but has forgotten the password for this. We can’t reset the password because we don’t know the email account associated with it, or indeed details of any email account that has a known password. I decide that it’s going to be simpler to start from scratch with new everything. To set a new email address we need a mobile phone number, which Mike doesn’t have and Vera’s UK one doesn’t seem to work. It makes me realise the barriers that exist for people trying to get online later in life, let alone use these systems once they have access. And if it goes wrong and stops working? Just don’t even think about that!

So our next mission is to get a CanadIan SIM for my phone. To use my UK SIM here would invoke charges of £6 per day. As I only pay £3.50 a month for my phone package that is clearly too much of a rip-off. So off to find PC mobile, which has an outlet at a Fortinos supermarket some distance away. When we arrive there is a customer ahead of us having a handset upgrade, which seems to be a really protracted process. Mike doesn’t like having to wait and wants to either go elsewhere or come back later. Vera meanwhile notices that Fortinos has a British section within their international food and goes to investigate.

Surprisingly no marmite

What we want to do next is visit some waterfalls.

Hamilton has over 100 falls, and claims to be the waterfall capital of the world. The city is just below the Niagara escarpment, which runs for hundreds of kilometers and is a dominant landscape feature here. It also contains the oldest forest ecosystem and trees in N America, and is a UNESCO world biosphere reserve. 

Mike drives us to near the Buttermilk falls, and Vera and I walk through the forest to see them. 

We then go onto the Albion falls

Which are much more impressive 

Back to Mike’s for lunch. Vera is suddenly overcome with tiredness. Whether this is due to walking in the 32 degree heat (with the humidity it feels a lot hotter) or the change in time zones, or a combination of the two, I don’t know. While she rests I go and explore the local neighbourhood.

Battlefield Park is the site of the famous battle of Stoney Creek in 1813 between the US and Britain, part of three years of fighting that started in 1812.

The monument is quite impressive, and was opened electronically in 1913 by a signal sent by Queen Mary via the newly installed transatlantic subsea cable.

The park also has an impressive sculpture, The Eagles Among Us

. Originally commissioned to commemorate the Iroquois and Ojibwa contribution in the 1812 war

people are now using it to remember the First Nation children recently found in unmarked graves, with small messages and tokens being left at the stones. Very moving 

I carry on through the park and into the woods of the escarpment. A very faint and steep path leads up to the Devils Punchbowl, where yet another waterfall has carved out an impressive bowl in the rock. No water is flowing and the fencing makes it impossible to get a decent photo

Though does keep everyone safe 

There are great views over Hamilton, and Lake Ontario, to Toronto 

It’s a nice walk back to Mike’s via Green Acre park. The squirrels here are large and black. Here’s a youngster

$5,000 for riding your toboggan seems unduly harsh

We eat at Mike’s, but we are making little impact on his fridge. Vera revives in the evening, but we are sensible and go back to our apartment relatively early and have a beer in the garden as the stars begin to appear in the night sky

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