Forty-Five Years Later

We thought that a day trip would be a nice way to celebrate our 45th and decided to motor to Eganville on the Bonnechere River. There is some variance on the pronunciation of Bonnechere, which is a name of French origin, my grade school French telling me that it means something like "Beautiful Darling." I have hear it pronounced both the French way as well as a very Anglicized Boncher.

The original plan was to visit the Bonnechere caves and then to dine at the German restaurant in town. We had stopped there before for lunch many years ago on our way through town before we even moved to this area.

In the end we did neither. We skipped the caves for a geological tour put on by the museum staff, and our timing wasn't right for dining out since we had a picnic lunch earlier.

The tour began at the museum (former post office), a fine old building: one of the few remaining after a fire long ago.

From there we crossed the bridge and headed downstream on the other side of the river.

A display marks the beginning of the actual tour. One can pick up pamphlets and do a self-guided tour, but we had a guide that day.

The guide and the group. ↓

The bedrock is Ordovician Limestone, ~450 millions years old, is exposed by the river and tons of fossils. The bedrock is exposed in the following photo and a number of boulders of different types had been collected and lined up for our education.

Fossils were abundant, the local hero being this orthocone (below) in one of the boulders (above). Sue's finger gives a sense of proportion, but you can see that the rocks is chalk full of all sorts of fossils.

We trekked down to the river.

And stopped to view an old, flooded quarry on the way.

On the way back, I asked Sue to sit on a bench with a view down to the river.

Before crossing back over the bridge I stopped to take a photo of the dogwood blossoms. I was surprised to see anything blossoming at this time of year, and, frankly, don't know if it's really dogwood or something else.

It was something different and fun to do 45 years later: something that I likely wouldn't have predicted all that time ago. Someday, we must return to visit the caves and eat at the Schnitzel Haus.