Along a Winding Road

A couple of weeks ago I was off on a little day trip around the countryside on a beautiful sunny spring day.  I was heading generally north from Mississauga ON, then west, and then turning south to my home in Woodstock ON.


I love to study online maps and pick out driving routes that I haven't used before.  Usually this involves no great change in type of scenery from familiar routes, but it still creates a little sense of adventure -- what will I see this time that I haven't seen before?


On this occasion, I plotted out a route north on Winston Churchill Boulevard, through Terra Cotta to Belfountain, and then east along the Forks of the Credit Road to Highway 10.  Anyone who has ever driven through the area will be chuckling at what I let myself in for!


This whole area, known as the Caledon Hills, is a rolling landscape with some hefty changes of elevation and the smaller country roads still have some pretty steep grades, dating back to the days before the invention of massive earth-moving equipment made it possible to push roads through hills!  It's a beautiful, relaxing drive with little traffic, the kind I always enjoy most. 


As I left Belfountain heading east, there were warning signs indicating a winding road for 10 km or so, and a specific warning sign that the road was unsuitable for trucks, buses, and motor homes.  Well, it certainly was narrow and had some sharp bends but I didn't see anything that a competent bus driver couldn't handle -- at first.  Then the road reached the rim of the Credit River Valley and started down.  Suddenly.  Steeply.  And with two hairpin bends (which felt like 4 or 5) in quick succession -- bends taken from a hairpin that had been thoroughly flattened out.  Oh, my.


Well, I learned years ago that the best way to go down a hill like this is to get the car into first gear and let the engine control the descent.  Even with that, I was stamping hard on the brake at each bend.  At the bottom of the hill the road crosses the river on a sharply curving bridge, makes a wild swerve under a railway trestle, and after a couple more zigzags starts up the other side.  The remainder of the road out to Highway 10 is full of more bends, all very narrow, and certainly not a lot of room for error.


Now, if I'm making all this sound scary, I apologize.  It wasn't scary to me, just surprising.  I had never dreamed that this kind of Alpine road building could be found right here in southern Ontario, so close to Toronto.  That said, I have to admit that some drivers might lose their nerve on those hairpin bends.  But for those who don't mind, it's a picture of wild natural beauty kindly accommodating human interference -- but on Mother Nature's own terms, thank you very much.  With all the forests around, I'm sure it's a sight for sore eyes during the fall colour season -- and that road is likely a bumper-to-bumper parade of cars.  But I'd like to check it out all the same, probably in the early-ish morning hours of a fall weekday.  When I do, I'll be sure to run a video cam so you can see what it looks like.  There is NO safe place to pull over and take still pix because there is no room to pull over at all!