Long Weekend Thoughts

The Labour Day long weekend is always bittersweet for me.  I like it because it's usually a beautiful, sunny long summer weekend, but it's also the harbinger of fall.  It signals the beginning of the new school year, and officially announces cooler nights and golden autumn sunlight.  For those of us whom are hard-core about such things, summer still has a full 16 days of glory, and September can be a very hot and beautiful month with long evenings and cool nights.  It's definitely still patio season.  There are those who see the Labour Day long weekend as the end of summer, who bundle up and start shopping for winter boots.  That just hurts me, personally.

This long weekend, Drew and I were in Kingston, as he had things to do for the oncoming school term despite the fact that he has been working on his thesis all through the summer.  Since this is the last long weekend until Thanksgiving, we took as much advantage of it as possible - and fortunately it was a much lovelier weekend than the original weather forecasts had said it would be.  We biked out to Lemoine conservation area outside of Kingston to go for a swim (which probably was the last!).  The water was warm, clear, and deep.  Huge rocks still covered in algae line the shore, and cover the steeply dropping lake bottom.  It's ruggedly beautiful in a way I've only seen in Canada.

The shoreline at Lemoine's point, looking over a bay

Looking out into Lake Ontario, with Wolfe Island in the background

 We swam for quite a while, floating around in the clear blue water, until we got tired of treading water and swam back in.  I let the big swells (which you can't really see in these photos) push me into shore over the rocks, which made getting out of the lake much easier than getting in was.  We even ran into a man with a lovely little dog, whose favourite game was swimming for the stick.  I think we could have stayed there, hemmed in by evergreens and lake water, all afternoon.  It was only the thunder clouds in the distance that drove us back the way we came.