Most Beautiful Place In Ontario - Day 3

Our third day in the Bruce Peninsula started out pretty disappointing, but ended up being surprisingly wonderful. We had planned to go to Flowerpot Island that day. There are ferries that take you there and pick you back up after a certain amount of time. We wanted to go out there and hike the trails on the island. It is supposed to be really beautiful and the flowerpot formations are unreal. When we got to the ferry company to buy tickets, we were shocked. The prices were completely unreasonable. We had already spent way more money than we should have on this trip so we decided against Flowerpot Island. 

The previous day, we had actually tried to go to the Bruce Peninsula National Park to do some hiking and see some sights. By the time we got there, the park was completely full and they were not letting anyone else in so we had to turn around. Since Flowerpot Island didn't work out, we decided we would try our luck at the park again. It was a bit earlier than we had tried to go the day before so we thought we had an okay chance of getting in this time. As luck would have it, we got in with no problem! 

After parking in the parking lot that we were assigned at the gates, we walked towards the Cyprus Lake trails. It actually worked out so much better getting into the Bruce Peninsula National Park on the third day instead of the second day of our trip. We had to walk quite far. I don't think we would have enjoyed it much if we hadn't had a day to recover from that first, excruciating hike, haha. 

The paths took us through forests around a couple small lakes until we got to Lake Huron at Indian Head Cove. I loved the boardwalk paths through the forest, they were adorable and beautiful and magical.

I loved all the twisty trees

The cove was PACKED! People were all over the place. At first I was kind of sad that there were so many people there, it was completely different than our first hike where there was not a soul in sight for hours. Since there was so many people, my sister and I heard about a cool way to get down to the cave below called the Grotto, we wouldn't have found out about it if it wasn't for all the people there! From above we couldn't really see the way down. When we decided we would do it and got down to the entrance, I almost wanted to turn back! It was just a tiny hole leading down into darkness... I am a big scaredy cat, so from what I saw, it did not look like my idea of a good time. I followed my sister down anyways and I am so glad I did! It was really cool and not even very difficult. 

Standing up here I heard someone say "This is why blue is my favourite colour"

This is the hole we had to climb into...

Following people out the other side of the hole

Climbing down into the Grotto

Being in the grotto was awesome! It was my second favourite place of the trip. (The first being basically all the lookouts from the first day's hike...) You can swim under if you are an amazing swimmer or if you have scuba gear, I heard someone say that people have died trying though...

The view out from the Grotto

We climbed back up and continued our hike through the boulder beach and around to another small lake...and then another one after that I think, haha. It was a nice hike through the forest and I went swimming in one of the small lakes off of the trail. It's a beautiful hike and the paths around the small lakes are very nice and peaceful. 

View towards boulder beach

Someone scratched in the word YOLO on this sign, hahahaha

We got back to our car and drove into Tobermory for dinner at the Crowsnest Pub again and spent the rest of our last night in the Bruce Peninsula just hanging out at the Bed and Breakfast on our balcony. We left after a quick breakfast the next morning and made the long drive back to Toronto. I still would love to live up in this area. It was ridiculously beautiful and we hardly explored any of it! If it wasn't so cold in the winter and if there was more to do career-wise up there, I would be seriously considering moving up there! I just don't know what I would do for a job... maybe I will figure something out, haha. 

I would recommend a trip to the Bruce Peninsula for anybody and everybody. I can't wait to go back! If I hadn't injured my foot recently, I probably would have made another trip out there by now. Next time I will definitely be checking out Flowerpot Island! I wish I could spend the rest of Summer there...and Fall....

Most Beautiful Place In Ontario - Day 2

On my second day in the Bruce Peninsula, I woke up with sore legs and blisters all over my feet. We decided we would be taking it a bit easier that day. We packed all of our stuff into the car because we were staying at a different Bed and Breakfast for the rest of our trip. 

Our first stop of the day was to Devil's Monument. It is this huge natural formation of rocks. It is kind of like stacks of flat rocks. It's called a "flowerpot" because of the shape. It starts off thinner at the bottom and gets wider at the top. I had seen pictures of it before when I was researching which trails I should take in the Bruce Peninsula area and thought it didn't look that impressive. It is really cool in person though! Pictures just don't do it justice. It looks so small in my pictures, haha. 

The trail we took was quite small. You walk through forest for a little bit (where we are sure we heard a rattlesnake right by the trail, we ran away so we didn't see it...) until you come to a set of stairs that leads down to a rocky area and towards the lake. You have to walk down the rocks to get to Devil's Monument and the lake is just beyond that. 

You can see how thin the base is

The area had a lot of stacked rocks like this and small waterfalls would come through the cracks. It was pretty!

This is the view of Devil's Monument from the bottom! It's huge!

We walked down to the lake and then back the way we came to get to the car. I think we were only there for about half an hour or 45 minutes.

After the Devil's Monument trail we drove down to Singing Sands beach. There was a trail there too, which we took. I didn't take very many pictures at the beach. We went further along the shore to swim so there would be less people. That far down the beach wasn't very pretty. There were rocks and plants poking out of the sand. It was a very nice place to swim though. I couldn't believe how warm the water was! It was a huge difference compared to swimming on the other side of the peninsula. You could walk into the water forever and not go past your waist. Lake Huron is the clearest lake I have ever been in. There were minnows swimming around and you could see them everywhere. If you stood still, they would come swim at your feet, it was so weird, haha.

After spending a bit of time swimming and walking some of the trails, we headed into Tobermory for food. Our favorite place there was the Crowsnest Pub. I was obsessed with the smokey tequila lime chicken wings. They were amazing. 

After dinner and some drinks we went to our second B&B (Caribbean of the North). We stayed in the Nautical King Suite. It was very nice! The suite was on top of a garage so it was our own little place. We had our own bathroom and a balcony on each side of the garage! One overlooked the lake as it was a lakefront property. 

View from the balcony on the stormy second night of our stay

The second day of our trip to the Bruce Peninsula was very laid back. It was a nice change from the exhausting day before but I was ready for more adventure by our third and last full day! 

Probably The Most Beautiful Place In Ontario - Day 1

After seeing pictures of the Bruce Peninsula area on instagram, I knew I had to go there. It was so beautiful in pictures I couldn't even imagine how beautiful it would be in real life. I had a long weekend at the end of June for Canada Day, my sister and husband were off work as well. We ended up planning this trip pretty last minute. I learned that a ton of people go up to this area for long weekends in the summer. My husband hates camping, so that was out, every hotel was completely full, and it took ages for us to find a bed and breakfast that was available. The first one we did find was only available for the first two days of our trip. We booked it just in case we couldn't find anything else. Thankfully, we did end up finding another B&B for our last two nights. Because of our terrible planning skills, it ended up costing way more than I wanted to spend. It was worth it though. It was amazing up there. A couple days in I started looking up houses for sale in the area, haha. Before we left I purchased the Bruce Trail Reference Guide, which is available on the Bruce Trail website and also in a few book stores as well. It has maps of all of the areas of the Bruce Trail so I used it (along with google) to plan our hikes for the weekend. We weren't able to go everywhere I wanted to because one of the places on our list was an island and the boat rides to get there were ridiculously over-priced. I hope to go one day though! 

We left Toronto on Thursday evening after I finished work. It was about a 4.5 to 5 hour drive to our first B&B. We stayed at Moeke's Ankerstee B&B for Thursday and Friday night. Ina was a wonderful host! She is very easy to get along with and nice to talk to! She also has the nicest dog in the world whose name escapes me at the moment...she was so sweet though! 

Our first night basically just consisted of us meeting Ina and then going to bed, since we arrived so late. We woke up early the next morning for a delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon, yogurt with fruit, tomatoes, and toast. The first day was our longest hike. Ina's B&B was closer to Lion's Head than our next B&B was so it obviously made sense to do our hike at Lion's Head while we were closer to it. In hindsight, putting the longest, most grueling hike first was probably not the greatest idea, haha. 

When I looked at the trail maps from my reference guide book, and searched the internet for tips, I found a loop at the Lion's Head trails. It was a 16 or 17km loop. I thought to myself "the average walking speed is about 4km/h so this should take us 4 hours and we can take an hour or 2 to stop and take in the sights". Little did I know that this trail was not like walking on a nice path, and you go up and down over and over. I imagined it would be the same as the trail my sister and I walked in Hockley Valley. It was wide and flat and easy. This trail was nothing like that at all. Rarely were we walking on anything but big rocks or boulders and tree roots. To make matters worse, I decided my most comfortable shoes were my Reebok Easy Tone runners. These shoes have balls on the heel and toes of your feet so that you are always off balance and using more muscles to walk. This does not go over well on ground that is already super uneven. I fell down once, almost twisted my ankle numerous times, and thinking back, I am lucky I didn't fall off the edge of a cliff and plummet to my death. 

We were really not as prepared for this hike as we thought we were. We didn't bring enough actual food, or water for that matter, and it was over 7 hours of hard, fast walking. When we got to our first lookout and checked our trail map, we saw that we had barely gone anywhere and still had a whole huge loop to complete. This freaked us out so we barely had time to stop and take anything in and we had to keep going at a fast pace because we were worried we wouldn't make it out of the deep forest before sundown. There are dangerous animals that deep in the wilderness so we really didn't want to be there in the dark, haha. But let's start from the beginning!

We drove to Lion's Head and found the parking lot for the trail entrance that we planned to take. After sunscreening and bug-spraying up, we grabbed our backpacks and excitedly hurried onto the trail. A little ways in, on the side of the trail, there was this "pothole" made by glaciers. It was kind of cool! 

Me Inside the Pothole

Inside the pothole from above

View From Inside the Pothole Looking Up

In this area, the ground was still nice and foresty (as opposed to just huge boulders). I fell in love with walking on forest paths. The ground is so soft and bouncy. It is just so lovely to walk on! I wanted to take off my shoes and become an elf and live there forever....except the reference book warned us that there was a lot of poison ivy in the area so I did not do that, haha. It made me wish I lived in a time before concrete and asphalt. Imagine how nice it would be if we could walk on soft ground like that all the time. It just made me so happy for some reason. 

After walking for a while longer we came to our first lookout, and it was beautiful. As you kept walking along the path there were small lookouts everywhere. Be prepared for a billion pictures...

 

I love the little white tree on the big white cliff

I love how trees can just grow out of the rock so high up

I know this looks nothing like Hawaii, but I was reminded of it here. When I was in Hawaii this past December, I went to a black sand beach on the big island. It was stunning. I was so taken by the way the black of the sand, the blue of the ocean, and the green of the plants just went together so beautifully. When I was here, it was kind of the same idea except instead of black sand it was the white rock of the cliffs. It looked amazing with the green of the trees and the blue of the lake and the sky. 

After these views, the trail goes further back from the edge and you make your way down. You end up on a rock/boulder beach at the lake. Hard to walk on in Reebok easy tones, but beautiful. That is where we decided to go swimming, haha. One of the most amazing parts of this hike was that we were completely alone for the majority of the time. We passed by people for the first bit and we ran into these two girls we met at the first lookout a couple more times, the last time being at this boulder beach, they turned back here. We were not even halfway through our hike at that point! The rest of the hike there was NOBODY. It seemed like nobody had even been down the trails in a long time because we were walking through spider webs the entire way after we went swimming. Oh, and by the way, the water was freezing. I had my feet in there and it was so cold they hurt. We had to get all the way in though! 

About to swim in freezing cold Lake Huron

The end part of the bouldery beach

After this section we got to walk uphill back to the top of the cliffs...yay...haha. This was the part of the hike where we were completely alone. I felt like I could build a treehouse and live there and nobody would ever find out. Maybe I will someday, haha. Alright, now for a whole lot more pictures! It may just look basically like the same picture over and over to some people but I just love it there so much and think all the pictures are beautiful and can't get enough of this place.

This rock jutting out looked like a gun, somewhere around this area was a place called Gun Point so we thought this might be why it's called that...

And this is a not so great attempt at a panoramic picture...

After these areas you go further into the forest, away from the lake. That is when we really tried to pick up the pace and get out of there before it got dark! We ended up having lots of time before the sun went down but we were so tired and hungry and just beat that we wanted to get back to the car as soon as we could. When we finally got to the side trail that would lead us back close to the trail that we started on, we were ecstatic and had a temporary energy renewal, haha. It took us over 7 hours to complete the entire loop and get back to our car. 

The first thing I did when we got to the car was take off my shoes and change into sandals. Then we just sat in the car with the windows rolled down and the doors open, not just because it was so hot, but because we reeked of bug spray...I think we went a little overboard with it. We went to the first restaurant we saw and ordered huge meals. Even just getting out of the car and walking to the restaurant was a difficult task by this point. My legs were so tired and sore, haha. We could barely even eat our food, I guess out of exhaustion. We got back to the B&B around 5:30 or 6. We all had showers and laid in bed. Sara was asleep by about 6:30pm, haha. My husband and I stayed up reading for a couple of hours and were asleep around 8 or 8:30pm! 

Immediately following the hike, I was thinking it was a terrible idea and we shouldn't have gone so far but after a couple of days, the bad memories started to fade and I found myself thinking about "next time"! I would definitely do it all over again...in better shoes...with more food and water...