With Brandon at camp & Maggie busy with her stuff, I had Saturday completely open so Mario and I hit up the Balaclava (is it a village?) Ontario to check out the abandoned wood mill & an area called Newfoundout where we saw a bunch of cabin ruins.

This area is an extremely rural part of Ontario just over an hour away from Ottawa so it was a bit of a drive but a ton of fun to explore.  The mill was burnt down and rebuilt I believe in the 1950s and the structure itself is in remarkable shape.  Only the areas directly exposed to the creek were rotten, everything else was completely solid.  We did see some locals, they remarked that everyone goes inside and didn’t seem upset at the arrival of strangers which was nice.

Newfoundout is a much older community, we ran into a farmer who is of Irish decent and he said his great grandfather helped settle the land though it’s hardly settled and only has 13 families live in the area.  LOL considering the amount of rain, I was pleasantly happy that the dirt road was not muddy so I was able to drive the Prius around.

As we drove along we saw this weird Christmas doll nailed to a tree, Mario remarked that’s a distraction for the serial killer and I replied probably but that I want to take a photo of it anyway lol.  I can just imagine if this were a movie I’d be yelling how stupid these people are haha.

Things went well though on the way back I ran over a screw close to home and it punctured the driver side rear tire. 🙁

I got home around 10pm, I could hear the hiss so I knew there was a puncture, when I measured the tire pressure it was at 27.5 psi so I figure it must have happened either on Sheppard or my street.  Sigh due to its location on the shoulder, it can’t safely be patched either so I had to buy a new tire today.

Sigh it was $240 I didn’t want to spend but so be it, I needed the car up and running.

I picked up Brandon around 12:30pm, he really enjoyed Cubaree but didn’t sleep well so he napped while I drove home and is resting a bit now.  Just finished mowing the lawn and hope to chill the rest of the day.