As soon as we left Wallaceburg, we encountered several large-scale vegetable fields, rather than the corn and soybean fields that we have grown accustomed to.
A large field of cabbage, with Brussels sprouts in the foreground.
Tomato field. Several tractor loads of tomatoes passed us on their way to a Conagra processing plant in Dresden. The processing plant recently celebrated its 75th anniversary.
In addition to the vegetables growing in the fields we passed this large greenhouse. We don't know what is grown inside, but it looked very similar to a greenhouse that we toured in 2018 that grew Jack-and-the-Beanstalk sized Bell Peppers.
Our museum-for-the-day was the Oil Museum of Canada in Oil Springs. Oil Springs is home of the worlds first oil well. The staff at the museum said there is a friendly rivalry with Titusville, PA about that claim and concedes that Titusville is home to the worlds first DRILLED oilwell. Oil Springs' well was hand dug about a year earlier than Drakes well.
In the mid-1800's the area around Oil Springs was swampy, and contained large amounts of crude oil on the surface, known as gum beds. The black stuff that looks like cow patties is actually petroleum.
A bull wheel routed the jerker lines (the wooden sticks in the photo) to individual wells. In this photo you can see two jerker lines that are parallel with one another and a third is going off at a right angle
After the museum we pedaled to Alvinston for lunch at the Riverstone Pizzeria. The place was packed, as the entire restaurant was reserved for a private party. However, the owner of the restaurant, Barbara, said she would ask the party's host if we could eat lunch at the bar. The host graciously allowed us to crash the party and we had a very good mushroom pizza. We learned that the party was to celebrate the 80th birthday of a gentleman named Norm.
Thank you Barb, for letting us stay and have lunch.
The final 20 miles of the ride had us battling both a headwind and the heat. However, just before we reached our hotel, we made a quick stop at McDonald's for an Oreo McFlurry. That was all that was needed to put us back in a good frame of mind!
Today's ride: 66 miles (106 km) Total: 3,535 miles (5,689 km)
