Sunday Aug 8th

Today's frustration? - getting my outlook email to send.  I tried to send 10 emails yesterday from my hotel room and outlook, which received my incoming mail just fine, wouldn't send my responses, etc.  Today I remembered why.  I had had this same problem inn Paris.  Verizon is not the correct outgoing server outside the US.  So, either I can figure out the server my cousins use and change the setting, or I don't send emails until I am back in the states.  (Nothing's easy, is it?)

At any event, I am now in Hamilton, actually Dundas - a small hamlet that is both part of Hamilton and a separate postal area.  I am in the home of another cousin, sister to the cousin in Toronto.  A few steps from here is the beginning of the Bruce Trail, a hiking path that goes to the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.  I am told the hike/path is something like the Appalachian trial in the states.  http://www.brucetrail.org/  Obviously, Tramp and I will not be hiking this, but we will be following it on the highway and stopping where-ever it looks like fun to get out and explore.  Our destination today is Tobermory, the other end of the trail, and an eco-lodge there called E'terra.http://www.eterra.ca/  Check it out.  If it is even half as nice as this website suggests, Tramp and I will be very happy there.  We are staying two nights to rest up and relax as, when we leave on Tuesday it will be at 5AM to catch a ferry - but more about that when I actually do it.

My cousin here in Dundas is an accomplished potter and her home is filled with beautiful pieces - her own and others whom she collects.  It is a feast for your eyes and my hands want automatically to go out to pick up, feel and examine each piece close up, but I dare not, of course.  It would be just like me to drop the first piece I handle.  So I sit here and just look, filled with awe that humans have figured out how to make these forms and colors and textures. 

The other wonderful part of being here is that this home was designed to blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors.  The entire back of the house is glass with a sloping roof line and skylights.  It is filled with potted trees and plants which mirror the wild forest-like woods beyond the swimming pool in the back yard.  So, when you are sitting inside, be it here in the kitchen where I am typing this, or in the den on the comfy sofa, or as you walk in the front door, you see trees, water and trees with little or no barriers.  It is a peaceful, grounded kind of feeling being in nature and yet protected from it.  Lovely.