Ate breakfast at the outside picnic table, nice sunny morning.
This drilling rig arrived to clean out the well, or more accurately the borehole. John tells me it's a job that's not been done in the past 20 years. They pull out about 200 feet of pipe and the pump on the end of it, and then send down various attachments to clean everything up.
Here is Jess working with the horses to help control the weeds, being organic they don't use herbicides
It felt a bit sad to leave the farm, it seems to belong to another age and world. Certainly the best and most interesting place we have stayed.
And so we head towards the small town of Buckhorn, and Kawartha Country Wines, where we are staying tonight. We have a choice of three routes, one going back through Peterborough. This will give us another opportunity to get to see the Peterborough Lift, which we failed to find yesterday. But today we are older and wiser, have done our research properly, and know where we are going.
We arrive at the right place, and pull up at a car park belonging to the Peterborough Museum and Archive. We are the only vehicle there and the place looks locked up.
The lock is quite awesome. It consists of two counterbalanced chambers, full of water, the upper lock being supported high in the air on a giant piston. There is a visitor centre, but this is also closed. Apart from a few visitors milling about, the lock is also deserted, with no one in the control room and no sign of life.
We know from yesterday's near visit that a tour boat is due to ascend the lock in half an hour, so we hang around and wait. Ten minutes before the boat is due there is a flurry of activity, seven lock keepers emerge from their rest room and scurry around getting everything ready. Theirs must be one of the best jobs in the world!The boat sails into the bottom lock, looking quite small.
The gates close and the two locks slowly begin to move. The upper lock contains more water than the lower, making it heavier, and making the top section fall and, through a wonder of hydraulic engineering, causing the bottom chamber to rise up. It's slow at first, but then moves surprisingly quickly considering the mass of water involved. It's all over in a couple of minutes and the boat carries on its way, nearly 20m (65 feet) higher than it started.
We travel on to Buckhorn, and park up outside Kawartha Country Wines store. They are well set up for visiting RVs, or Boondockers to use a term I have seen on the Harvest Hosts website, and even provide a power supply.
We go into the shop, and have a very comprehensive tasting tour through their range. My best success with homemade wine, back in my homebrew days, was blackcurrant. And so it proved here, the blackcurrant was my favourite, closely followed by the raspberry. They also make cider, and along with a few bottles of wine we also buy four bottles of their dry cider.
We retire to our van,and then it starts raining. We were planning on making a BBQ out of their fire pit and a discarded metal grill, but the rain is unrelenting and shows no sign of letting up. By 7pm Vera is investigating the van's grill, and I am seeing if I can use a garden umbrella to protect the fire.
But the rain suddenly eases off and stops. I quickly start a fire and rig up a BBQ using the grill and a couple of steel rods.
The steaks are cooked, and we eat at the under-cover garden tables. The mosquitos are very active tonight, they have clearly enjoyed the rain. The fireflies are also out again, tonight they have become airborne and dance around in the darkness
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