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Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

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Flowerpots, Grottos Hamilton, ON, Wednesday, 28 September 2011 8:00pm

We started our day in Tobermory with a quick breakfast of scones and then hopped on a tour boat. The boat passed over a couple of very shallow shipwrecks in the harbor (one is a coal schooner six meters below the surface, the other is a steamer that is above the surface in places). The water was crystal clear, and the surface wasn't choppy, so we got great views.

There were some scuba divers near the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor. Tobermory is billed as the scuba capital of Canada. They looked pretty cold, even in drysuits.

The cruise wound around a number of the islands, finally swinging by Flowerpot Island. There are some rock formations there where a hard cap of denser rock sits on top of a more-easily-eroded limestone base which the wind and waves have shaped like a flower pot.

We had lunch in Tobermory, then headed south to hike around in The Bruce National Park. We hiked through the forest to Georgian Bay, where there are beautiful rocky beaches in stark contrast to the sand on the Lake Huron side of the peninsula. There's a grotto in the cliff face where you can see down into the almost Caribbean blue water.

We took a direct route back to Hamilton. It was again supposed to rain, and the sky actually filled with menacing clouds. We got a few drops, but were otherwise dry, but we could see rain showers in the distance.