Small Town Life Unlocked

I’m not sure how I pictured retired life in a sleepy little town, but it turns out to be not so sleepy. Three mornings I’m at the school, two mornings I’m dragon boating, and one morning I’m at agility training. So much for sleeping in. Ray has competitive paddling two evenings a week and fits in long cycles or kayaks whenever he can. He’s also done a bit of volunteering with the Friends of Presqu’ile at the Interpretive Center in the park.

Brighton has a weekly Concerts in the Park series throughout the summer. Last week, we saw a local band called Bentwood Rocker who’ve been together more than 40 years. It brought me back to the days of my youth with classic rock tunes from the 80s.

Another source of local entertainment is Saturday night at the Brighton Speedway. Ray and I checked it out last weekend. It was loud and dusty and smelled like gas and burning rubber, but it was good fun. The mini-vans were the most entertaining. They’d crash into each other and have major structural damage, or a flat tire, and just keep tearing around the track, mud flying through the air, large pieces of metal flapping in the wind. There was a lot of attrition so it was kind of a last-man standing thing.

We had another Warm Showers guest this week, an adventurous young woman, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who’s cycling from Quebec to Vancouver this summer. We could end up with a lot of cyclists passing through as we’re one of the few Warm Showers hosts between Toronto and Kingston. They’re all on such interesting adventures though so it’s a great way to meet new people and learn new things. For example, Charline was talking about what food she missed from home that she hadn’t been able to find in Ontario. She described oatmeal with dinosaur eggs in it and when you pour hot water over it, the eggs turn into dinosaurs. I thought there must be a translation issue, but sure enough, Quaker makes something called Dinosaur Eggs Oatmeal. Learned something new.

From here Charline was headed up to Peterborough, then across to Tobermory, over the top of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay and west from there. Her parents are understandably concerned about their daughter wild camping her way across the country on her own, so if anyone wants to host her for a night along the way, let me know and I’ll pass along your info to her (looking at you, western cousins).

Juno and I went to our first “Agility Fun Match” last weekend. My sister’s long-time friend Teddy and her husband Lane run an agility training centre in the Kawartha Lakes, so Karen and Tom met Ray and I there. If you’ve ever taken your dog to a training class and found that the things they do perfectly at home suddenly go out the window as soon as they’re in a new environment, that’s what it’s often like for dogs with agility. They can run a course perfectly in their home training centre but take them somewhere new and they get the zoomies and forget everything they’ve learned. Fun matches are designed to give dogs exposure to new environments without the pressure of a competition. I was very proud of Juno as she managed to perform about as well as she does at our local training centre (which is not to say neither of us made mistakes). We’re nowhere near trial-ready yet, but it’s great to see her progressing, and it was fun to watch the more experienced teams whose dogs could whip through the weave poles in seconds. Weaving is the most complex of the agility obstacles and Juno and I are just starting our training now.

The guys finally got their hair cut and, much to my surprise, Nick was the first to cave. He offered me a bribe if I could get Ray to cut his hair before his appointment. I gave it my best shot but apparently I have no more influence over Ray than his mother does. Nick owes Ray a lunch, but more importantly, Ray has bragging rights. He is officially more stubborn than Nick.