Travelling without a plan

Our original intent was to ride out to Ottawa to spend the weekend with my sister, her husband, and their two cats. What actually happened was a little off target. I had completely forgotten that they had made plans to meet up with some friends for a week-long trip to Las Vegas and had asked if they could stay the night with us before catching their flight out from Buffalo. Oops!

As it turned out, however, they had been unsuccessful in recruiting anyone to cat sit for them while they were going to be away. Well! We could still go out to Ottawa, but instead of being a burden, we'd be doing them a favour. Ha! Done! Sold!

But then there was the weather. As much as we love riding, we don't "love" riding in pouring rain if we know it's going to happen. We waited until the last possible moment, hoping the weather forecasts would change (remember Earl?). We caved and rented a car. And boy was that the best decision, hands down.

We left Toronto just before noon. The sun was out in full force. The weather was absolutely perfect ... if we were on bikes. Grr. When I saw the signs for Prince Edward County, we made an impromptu decision to have lunch in Picton. We had hoped to stop in at Buddha Dog, but they were closed. Instead, we walked into The Painted Peppercorn, located just around the corner from Buddha Dog. We both enjoyed lamb burgers with salad. The burgers were fantastic; the patty was moist and full of flavour. The portion size was satisfying. We'll definitely be back!

As we ate lunch, the weather started to change. By the time we walked back to our rental car, it had started spitting. The rental started to look more appealing. We continued our journey to Ottawa. After a ridiculous amount of time spent crawling through construction zones, traffic finally started to move freely again. We passed a rider on a Ducati who was wearing very minimal gear: helmet, jacket, and gloves. He was stopped on the side of the highway. I commented that he better be stopped because he was putting on rain gear as we could see huge dark clouds looming up ahead of us. He passed us about 5 minutes after that. About 15 minutes later, the rain came down so hard that we could barely see any vehicles around us. We spotted the same Ducati rider stopped under a bridge. Wise move.

We drove through this crazy rainfall for quite a distance. It eventually cleared up. And then it came back with a vengence. This time, the rainfall was so heavy that we slowed down to a crawl and turned on the hazards; all the vehicles around us did the same. Wow. When we got through this second storm, we were extremely thankful for the rental car. Riding would have been absolute misery and extremely dangerous.

And now we're here! Safe and sound. And DRY. Yay!