About 5 months ago, the planning for this trip started with the event #150for150. If you haven’t seen pictures or heard of this event, click on the hastag which will link you to their Facebook page. The basic information is the gathering of 150 canoes on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park to help celebrate Canada’s 150 years. A group of fellow bloggers, vloggers, and online personalities were all involved in getting this organized. I was jumping in on this with two feet, thus getting our site booked for the weekend in Algonquin.
Friday was a bit crazy. I still had exams going on in school, which means lots of marking, less time for packing and organizing. We managed to get out of the house at a decent time that evening though and headed north to Algonquin. Our vehicle was packed with our gear including our 3 bikes. Luckily we have a hitch mount bike rack for 2 of the bikes, the third was inside. The top was reserved for our canoe that we have rented for the weekend.
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| That’s a LOT of gear. |
We have done the drive to Algonquin many times since we have moved here, so we know our usual pit stops and how long it will take. We were guessing somewhere around the 7-8 pm time slot that we would arrive at our campsite. I’m glad the sun sets later this time of year, or we would have been setting up in the dark. Since we were there for a special event, I had bought some flags to help decorate our site. I’m guessing that the other sites with flags were also a part of this event.
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| It’s a little like a MEC ad! |
The bugs were out in full force at the campground! This shelter, along with our new EUREKA! NoBugZone that we recently bought was our escape from those little buggers. (LOL, total pun intended). They just seem to love new people, and I think even with all these shelters, bug spray, bug jackets, we still managed to get numerous bites each. Mine were mostly on my feet since I love to wear flip flops and am a little stubborn and won’t put on socks and my other sandals.
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| Our reprieve from the bugs. |
All in all, a fairly quiet Friday night. Off to bed we went, needed our rest for our busy Saturday we had planned.
Upon waking up Saturday morning, it’s our usual routine. Hayden up early, Dan up early, me eventually waking up. Before we got out of the tent to get our things organized for breakfast, I asked Dan “Did you pack the stove?”. There was this sickening look he got, and a simple reply “No”. Well, now what? We have propane, but no stove. Not even our backpacking stove. We mulled over what food we had, what could we eat instead, how much of the food we brought didn’t need cooking. Eventually we decided that we should have enough firewood to get a fire going and have our usual breakfast. I mean, I have cooked on the fire many times before. This would be no different. The only thing was that we had planned for pancakes! Not our usual oatmeal-warm-up-water breakfast. Dan got up and started getting the wood ready for the fire while I gathered all the materials. I must say, the pancakes turned out really well, and we just had to have bacon! (There are a few people out there that I know would love that portion of our breakfast)
With our bellies full, it was time to pick up our canoe rental and head out for the day to do the activities we had planned. Our first stop was at Lake Opeongo and the Algonquin Outfitters store for the canoe rental. On our way up the road, I saw a black bear in the woods! We backed up to get a better look, hoping to capture a picture, but we just got the butt end of him running off into the woods. Oh well, another time!
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| I’m a little excited to get our canoe! |
Once we were all packed up, we had to stop back at the East Gate. Dan has been collecting the t-shirts with all the different symbols (portaging, tenting, now looking for hiking). They finally had the shirt, but alas prices not in the system. We were told to come back later! Oh well. Later it will be. We headed then to Smoke Lake, where I knew we could canoe from Smoke, into Tea, into Canoe and then portage our canoe back to Smoke.
It was about a 7 km distance, but we knew it was a good distance to try out the canoe we rented. It is the model that I really want to buy and this was a great way to try it out. It is amazing how many cottages there are along the way, just showing some of the background prior to Algonquin becoming a provincial park. As we pass under the highway into Tea Lake, you can see Canadian paraphernalia at the camp ground. It must be people here for the canoe events! As we travel along, we stop by a rock face to eat lunch, where we also spotted some cool spiders.
We then decided to check out the events going on at East Beach for the 150 for 150 celebration. Will tell you more about that in Part 2 🙂
After the events, we stopped at the site to have a quick snack, where we were visited by a number of local animals. You can tell that they get fed very generously by previous occupants. No, we did not feed them anything! Then we headed out on the Railway trail to do some biking. We love biking this trail, as it is a nice easy trail for all of us to enjoy.
Our evening was fairly low-key. Lots of time in the bug shelters, hanging out in the hammock, walking to the beach at sunset and having a campfire.
Sunday morning came pretty fast, today is the big canoe event, which I will go into more detail in Part 2! However!! I woke up to notice that one of our flags was stolen off our camp post overnight! I was not a happy camper! It’s hard to believe that people do these things, and we are glad nothing else was taken. Breakfast was on the fire again, seems that we lucked out with not having our stove, and we packed up our gear (which was all wet from the rain that night and during the morning, oh and more during the day).
Then we headed over to Smoke Lake to register and then proceed to Canoe Lake!