Amazing Grace

A frosty start to May 14th and a morning's ride through forest and swamp until we started to reach more cultivated land near Tweed.  Lakeside trail to Tweed ..

 A novel idea (!) - a little lending library at a spot by a park bench overlooking the lake....

See littlefreelibrary.org



Lady was feeling more energetic, and we continued some way past Tweed, eventually finding a place to stay near Ivanhoe with Pete and Julie Marshall, who keep pulling horses (by which I mean horses that pull) .

Pete's champion pony pulling pair, harnessed up ready for work. 

The lovely grey Molly is a Percheron mare, the other a Haflinger/quarter horse gelding.  Pete was a mine of interesting equine information, but exhausted by the previous night's lack of shut-eye, I reluctantly retired relatively early.  Pete let me use their mobile home, and I slept like a log.
May 15th and cutting across country something tells me I am travelling through Amish land..

Another little clue...

And it is not long before I come across this neat Amish farm with vegetable garden and washing hung out to dry...

..and this rural ploughing scene....

I had hoped to stop somewhere just the other side of Campbellford, but although farmland ran back to the trail, it was not until I reached a country road several miles further on that I came across a farmhouse surrounded by machinery.  It had started to rain as I knocked at the door, so I was relieved when a friendly elderly lady appeared. Grace Wynne invited me in, and when son Michael arrived Lady was put into a shed with an enormous pile of hay while I joined them for supper. To my surprise it transpired that Grace was very well travelled, having visited China, Argentina, Singapore, Malaysia, the Aegean and the UK to name but a few.  With her husband she drove all over America including Alaska and Labrador, though they failed to make South America when they ran out of road.

 Grace with some of the twenty seven barn cats she feeds...