12 hours, 5 cities, 5 people, 5 (or more) times lost, 202 photographs, 377.9 kilometres = the trip around a little bit of Southwestern Ontario. It began at 9am, and after picking up the people, we promptly got lost using the Mapquest system. I think they have pretty old maps there...so...not a good start. First stop: Orangeville, where we needed to use their fabulous service known as McDonald's. After the short stop, we were off to Collingwood and the Blue Mountain. It is a pretty short mountain, really, but still, in Ontario, that's kind of rare. We took the open-air gondola up, spent about 2.5 hours there, walked around, had some exercise, enjoyed the beautiful sea (which is not green...but the sky is blue). We were hoping to see the so-called "fall colours" from the trees, but all we saw were mixed-coloured trees. It's still a great view, but not as spectacular as we had hoped for. It was all downhills from there...literally (as we took the gondola down) and figuratively. Our next stop was Craigleith Provincial Park, had a picnic, and walked around the "shale" coastline. People were fishing (although what they caught were a bit questionable...including that black thingie), lots of dead ladybugs around, and my camera battery went dead. That's never happened before...so there was a minor panic, but that sort of resolved itself when I took the battery pack off, played with it a little bit and then put it back in. Next stop: Eugenia Falls. It's a waterfall that looks more like a water leakage...very little water coming down from it. We then learned that it's better in Spring, so I guess that's when we'll come back again... Disappointed by the water leakage, we backtracked a bit to visit Beaver Valley Lookout that we passed by earlier. It wasn't too bad, except the sun is at a particularly awkward angle that makes photography almost impossible. So anyway, we returned home after that, passing Swiss Chalet on the way. Interesting how it took about 2.5 hours to get from Waterloo to Collingwood, about half an hour from Collingwood to Eugenia, yet only about 1.5 hours to get from Eugenia back to Waterloo...hmm... Anyway, at least we figured it's not that far, so it's kind of feasible to visit again. Overall, I really enjoyed this trip, and mom would have enjoyed it immensely with the driving around country roads.

No, I don't trust my balance, hence the inability to do anything involving perilous heights.

Eating Swiss Chalet two days in a row isn't really good...especially when the chicken in the second day's SC is overcooked...