We are on the road by 6:00 to avoid the heat. No place in town is open so early, so we plan on stopping for breakfast at our first opportunity. Port Bruce, about 15 miles down the road, has a small business area with nothing open until 9:00. We ask a resident about breakfast in town and he says an old guy used to have a place open early in the morning but it closed up over a year ago. We pedal on. When we arrive in Port Burwell we have been riding for 25 miles, a couple of hours, and we are still looking for breakfast. Port Burwell has a nice little downtown with 3 or 4 restaurants, but nothing open this early. A man on a small tractor with a portable pump is the only one around downtown, watering hanging baskets of flowers. We ask him if there is any place serving breakfast. He says we can get a pretty good breakfast at the Canadian Legion Hall, a purple building, about 10 blocks down the road. When we arrive at the legion hall we see three cars in the parking lot, and an empty outside dining area attached to a brick building with no windows. Inside is a hallway with washrooms on the right and a kitchen on the left. The hallway opens into a big open area with ten long folding tables, with chairs to seat quite a few people, and a step up platform with Legion paraphernalia at the far end of the room. Four men, all in their 60’s or 70’s, are sitting around the first table looking at us curiously, as if surprised we are there, it look as if they had been playing cribbage. ‘A man downtown told us we could get breakfast here.’ One of the men immediately gets up and says, ‘He did, did he? Well, yes you can. There’s coffee over there in the corner, help yourselves. What do you want for breakfast?’ We sit at an adjacent table, he brings out a simple typewritten menu, and we order. Then he goes into the kitchen to help a woman cook our order. The other men ask us about our trip and tell us about the Legion being open this morning. Our cooks, Tom Kirkpatrick and Martha Marshall, have been voluntarily opening the Legion hall for breakfast for the past three years since no other place nearby is open this early any longer. This is really just a place for the locals, normally. A woman named Norma comes in and sits down at the table with us, and the men at the other table drift away, out the door. Norma talks about her 14 year old grandson, and about how kids go away to school and then get jobs someplace else. We are joined by Bill who tells us about how Scouting used to be very popular for kids in the area a few years earlier, they had met in the Legion hall and had great jamborees with hundreds of boys in the nearby Provincial Park. He told us about the local indians and said the Port had shipped coal at one time, but now the railroads were gone, mostly farming and windmills around now. Norma has a bandaged knee and tells us about her knee surgery and subsequent nosocomial infection, from which she almost died. ‘How do you like the Canadian health care system?’ Both Norma and Bill, like most Canadians, are very happy with their health care system, and how well it works. One problem they talk about is aliens illegally getting medical care. We finish breakfast and go outside to resume riding. As we are leaving we notice a man in his 40’s sitting outside in the patio area. He asks us where we are going. After telling him, he says, ‘When you get to the detour sign down the road just keep going straight, you’ll save yourself a couple of miles at least. It’s a dirt road for maybe a quarter mile, but not bad. I walked it last year and you can get your bikes through pretty easy. There’s one place where the road caved into the lake is why the road’s closed, but it hasn’t gotten any worse’. When we get to the detour sign we have to go through a latched gate. The road is paved for a quarter mile, then dirt, then two overgrown weedy trails until we came to the collapsed road. It’s more like a half mile of trail. Just as we had been told, we could pass safely by, although I certainly didn’t want to be closer to the edge. The overgrown trails continue, it looks as if no one has used these trails even for walking, in quite a while. Finally we arrive at a barricade and a paved road. A car with a flashing yellow light is driving towards us as we lift our bikes and trailers over the barricade. The driver is only delivering mail, looks at us quizically, turns around, and drives away. By then it is getting quite hot and we are glad we took the short cut. We arrive in Port Dover as it is really starting to get hot and check into Angelos of Dover. Downstairs is a bar, pretty empty at 2:00 in the afternoon, with renovated hotel rooms upstairs. Our bikes can stay downstairs in a back room.
Greg