This past weekend was our annual camping trip to Balsam Lake. While last year’s trip was a lot of fun, this year wasn’t so much. First off, our numbers were down from 9 campsites and 33 people last year to 6 campsites and 22 people. Unavailable were three families that have been camping with us for many years, so they were missed. Problem number one. Friday night was fine; we arrived in the late afternoon and got set up, then had dinner. Not long after we got there, one of the other kids, Dominik, fell in the forest and cut his leg on a branch. It turned out that the branch had actually punctured his leg, and there was a large hole. His mom Jenny took him to the hospital in nearby Lindsay. After a few hours in the ER, she returned with Dominik, who was very proud of his six stitches. Problem number two.

The rest of the night was less eventful. We sat around the campfire, got the kids to bed, then sat around the campfire some more, drank some frosty beverages, and ate chips and marshmallows. It got pretty cold that night, so Gail and I shivered in our sleeping bags for a while before getting to sleep. We had made sure that we had enough warm things (blankets and warm PJs and stuff) for the kids, so they were fine, but we were freezing. Problem number three.

The next morning was great. Gail got up with the boys, as I got a bit of a lie-in. We had breakfast and the boys rode their bikes for a while, though Dominik and his brother Anton crashed into each other on their bikes, and though Dominik was fine, Anton scraped his arm and leg up pretty good. No ER visit required for that one, but I’d call that problem number four.

Later in the morning, we got together with the other families and had a communal brunch. One of our camping traditions is that we get everyone together one morning and make egg McMuffins. I was on egg duty while Jeff did ham slices, Liisa did cheese, Faisal toasted the English muffins, and Steve sort of supervised and helped out as necessary. Every year the assembly line is different, and it’s a lot of fun. After the cooking and eating was done, the adults who weren’t cooking helped clean up… and that’s when the rain began. Problem number five.

Tarps were quickly whipped out, and Steve and Richard climbed trees and worked tirelessly in the rain to keep Lynda’s site dry (which was where our communal campfire was). The rest of the morning and the whole afternoon were spent hiding from the rain. I sat in our dining tent and taught Ryan and Dominik how to play cribbage, others played euchre by the campfire, Nicholas and Jake watched DVDs in Jeff and Kerri’s camper, some people read books, and others napped. By late afternoon, we were all quite tired of the rain. Gail had found a couple of small leaks in our tent, so she rearranged the beds so that none of them got wet. We had figured by that time that our beach towels were not likely to get used for anything else, so we started using them to mop up the tent. Problem number… what am I at now? Five? Six?

Paul and Jenny’s tent was leaking worse than ours and given that, plus problems number two and four (their kids both getting hurt), they decided to cut their losses, and packed up in the rain and headed home. At dinnertime, we all decided that we just wanted to be dry for a while, so as we had done one previous year, we all drove into town and went to a restaurant for dinner. For an hour or so, we didn’t care that it was still raining, and when we got back from dinner, it had stopped. Gail grabbed our damp sleeping bags and ran for the comfort station, where there were washers and (more importantly) dryers. A couple of hours and a few dollars later, our sleeping bags were warm and dry again. Campfire was fun that night, as we roasted marshmallows and enjoyed the lack of rain… until about 10:00, when the thunderstorm hit. Problem number… oh, I don’t know. Look it up.

The rain was pretty hard, and the thunder was loud. I love thunderstorms, so once I realized that our tent was no longer leaking (or at least was leaking in places we already had covered), I actually enjoyed it, and slept better that night than the previous one.

Sunday morning, the rain had stopped, but everything was still wet. We had no choice, though, but to pack all the wet stuff up into the van. Judicious use of towels, tablecloths, and blankets kept most of the dirt and mud contained, and we were on the road by 11:30 or so. It was nice and sunny at home, so we put the tents up again in the backyard to dry, and then all of us had the nicest, warmest, and most welcome showers / baths we’d had in recent memory.

Day Four: North of Superior
It’s about a five hour drive from the Sault to Manitouwadge, but we were in no big hurry. We packed up in the morning and headed out. Hwy 17 north of the Sault goes through Lake Superior Provincial Park, which is absolutely beautiful. There were lots of hiking trails and beaches, and one place where you could walk out onto a ledge under a cliff where several-hundred-year-old native-drawn pictographs are visible. (Aside: on the ledge, there is a plaque dedicated to a Canadian author and artist named Selwyn Dewdney, who studied and wrote about native pictographs for many years. One of his sons, Kee Dewdney is a professor at Western, where I did my Masters.)

On the drive, John was leading the way, and for whatever reason, didn’t want to stop anywhere along the way, so we passed by a number of photo opportunities on the way up. Gail was a little disappointed, but we figured we were coming back the same way anyway, so we’d get the pictures then. Unfortunately, when we did come back, it was very foggy, so some of the pictures we missed on the way up were impossible on the way down. We stopped at Wawa for the obligatory picture with the big goose, and also to grab lunch and fill up. A couple of hours later, we were in Manitouwadge, enjoying a beer on the back patio in the sweltering heat. Since it was Canada Day, we wandered down to the beach, where the town was having a BBQ, and there was some entertainment for the kids. On our walk back to Rolly’s place, he pointed out a barely-visible footprint in some dust, casually mentioning that it was from a bear. Bears are a big problem in this area. Rolly has seen some bear footprints in his back yard, and the town dump is no longer open to the public because of the number of bears that hang around there. If you have a load of stuff you want to take there, you have to contact the town who will arrange an escort for you, and the basic rule is “get in, dump your stuff, and get the hell out”. Anyway, a little while later, the black flies and no-see-ums came out, and we went inside.

One thing I found interesting about being that far north was that it stays lighter later. Around here during the summer, sunset is about 9:00, but up there, sunset didn’t happen until almost 10:00. Rolly was saying that it never really gets fully dark during the summer; even in the middle of the night, there’s still a bit of a glow on the horizon. In the winter, it’s the other way around — sunrise doesn’t happen until 8:30, sunset is shortly after 5:00, and the middle of the night is pitch black.

Something I was hoping for on this trip was a glimpse of the Northern Lights, but they are more common during the winter, and we never managed to see any. Rolly wants us to come up during the winter sometime, so maybe then.

Day Five: Manitouwadge
Monday was our first full day in Manitouwadge. In the morning, we went over to the police station. When you visit a police officer, it’s almost required that he give you a tour of the police station and put you in a jail cell. He put the boys in a cell and closed the door, and they had lots of fun trying to get out. After a while, he simply pulled the door open again, and we all had a good laugh at the fact that he never actually locked it, it was just heavy.

Rolly has a little sailboat that he keeps behind the police station, so after our tour he took the boys (and me) out for some spins around the lake. I’ve never been on a sailboat (other than a big-ass catamaran in Jamaica), so I never think about sailboats as being able to turn suddenly, but this one was small enough that one yank on the rudder and we’d turn 90° on a dime. It was very cool, and the boys loved it as well.

The rest of the day was spent kicking the soccer ball around, riding bikes (I took Nicky’s training wheels off and did the whole running-alongside-the-bike thing for a little while until he got tired of it), and watching the boys splash around in the little pool that Rolly had filled up for them. Once again (and I think this is pretty standard up north), the outside part of the day ended when the bugs came out.

Day Six: Moving Day
Rolly lives with his girlfriend Candyce, who grew up in Manitouwadge. Her mother was moving from a house in town to an apartment on Tuesday, and John, Jackie, and I offered to help with the move while Gail hung out with the boys. The move took part of the morning and an hour or so in the afternoon, since there wasn’t all that much stuff. It was overcast all morning, but luckily the rain held off until after we were done. Once the rain started, we hung out in the house playing cards, and the boys drew pictures. They also decided (entirely on their own) to write thank-you cards to Rolly and Candyce for inviting us to stay, and Nicky even wrote one to Gail and I for bringing him to Manitouwadge. We also borrowed Rolly’s computer and internet connection (high speed, thank goodness, I don’t know if I could handle a modem connection again) to book a trip on the Agawa Canyon Tour Train for Thursday, a trip we were really looking forward to, but as fate would have it, we would not be making.

Day Seven: Some Endings Come Too Soon
Wednesday we left Manitouwadge for Sault Ste. Marie, where we were going to camp for two nights. Shortly before we left in the morning, Gail realized that we had never retrieved the email that the Agawa canyon people had sent us with our confirmation number, so she asked me to go and get it. I logged onto Gail’s webmail account to get the number, and saw an email from Gail’s aunt Jeanne with the subject line “Sad news”. Gail’s aunt Barbie had passed away on Sunday, and was found by her daughter on Monday. At the young age of only 57, she had suffered a heart attack. The funeral was going to be in London (Ontario) on Friday. I broke the news to Gail, and we decided to cancel the train trip and simply head home. We figured we should be able to make it to (or near) Sudbury that day, and then it was about five hours home from there on the Thursday, giving us lots of time to get to London on Friday.

The drive to the Sault was broken up by a couple of photo-stops (though we did have to skip a few, as I mentioned before, because of the fogginess). We stopped at Old Woman’s Bay, and all four of us had a great time climbing around on the huge rocks on the beach. We also stopped to see the aforementioned pictographs, which was also very cool. We decided at that point that Lake Superior Provincial Park would be a great place to go camping for a week. We had a picnic lunch at the pictograph place before continuing on to Sault Ste. Marie. John and Jackie set up their trailer and we grabbed the rest of our stuff from them, and continued on our way. The drive to Sudbury was uneventful, other than the torrential rain that we hit just outside of Sudbury. We stopped at a hotel just off the highway around 9:00, went for a quick swim to relax (very nice after sitting in the van for most of the past 12 hours), and went to bed.

Thursday we drove home from Sudbury, arriving home shortly after lunch. Gail immediately packed yet another bag, and was picked up by her mother and aunt on their way to London. I arranged for a sitter for the boys for Friday, and drove out to London on Friday for the funeral.

Afterword
This was one of my favourite family vacations ever, though it obviously could have used a different ending. I love visiting new places, and the scenery through Lake Superior Provincial Park was some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, rivalling the Blue Mountains in Jamaica and the mountain vistas of Whistler and Jasper. (It’s hard to call the rocky desert landscape of the Grand Canyon “beautiful”, though it was certainly awe-inspiring.)

Gail turns the big four-oh next year, and decided a few years ago that she wanted to go to Paris for her 40th, so that’s in the plans for next summer. I turn forty the year after that, and I’m still trying to decide where I want to go then. After paying for Paris, I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford Hawaii or Australia the next year (two places I really want to go), and up until a couple of weeks ago, the thought of spending two weeks camping in Northern Ontario would not have appealed to me in the least, but after last week, maybe….

Note: this entry was written on Thursday evening, but I never got around to posting it until today, so in the article, “today” means Thursday (July 5) and “tomorrow” means Friday (July 6). I haven’t even written the second part of it yet.

We got home early this afternoon from a 2484 km trip around Ontario. The sheer size of this province astounds me — from our place to Manitouwadge was almost 1300 km and took us a day and a half, and Manitouwadge is still a full day’s drive from the Manitoba border, and the far north of Ontario is unreachable by roads. The trip was a lot of fun, and we saw some amazing things, but unfortunately we had to cut the trip short. On Wednesday morning, we found out that Gail’s aunt Barbie had passed away on Sunday. We were planning on leaving that morning anyway, but we missed out on an extra day in the Sault, plus a day in Sudbury as well. The funeral is tomorrow in London.

I’m going to break the trip in half, just so that I don’t have one huge blog entry; rather, two semi-huge blog entries. A google map of the whole trip is here.

Day One: Heading Out
Gail had the day off, and I left work around 2:00. We picked the boys up after their last day of school, and headed out. We stopped near Canada’s Wonderland, about an hour away, and went to Chuck E. Cheese’s for dinner. This is a family tradition — we go there for dinner on (or near) the first and last days of school. We continued on to Gail’s dad’s place in Sundridge, where we stayed the night.

Day Two: The Road to the Sault
Friday morning, we had a quick breakfast and headed out on the road. Gail’s dad John, his wife Jackie (Gail’s stepmother, though because they got married when Gail was in university, she never uses that term, she’s just “Jackie”), and their Jack Russell terrier Patches in their truck pulling their camper trailer, and the four of us following in our van. We went through North Bay and Sudbury, then stopped at a rest stop at Spanish River for lunch. Shortly after Spanish River, the traffic stopped dead. The next six kilometres took about an hour, until we got to an intersection that was being blocked by some native protestors holding signs saying things like “Honour our treaties”. There were several OPP officers there as well, directing traffic. I don’t get it. Do these protestors honestly think that they’re going to get what they want, or even gain any public support by inconveniencing hundreds of people who aren’t involved in their dispute?

Anyway, once we got through that, it was clear sailing through Sault Ste. Marie to Pancake Bay, where we were going to camp for the next two nights. Shortly before getting there, though, the traffic stopped again. We thought it might be another protest, but it turned out that there was a serious car accident ahead. After about 20 minutes, they cleared enough space so that we could get through, and the campsite was only about 2 km after that. The boys played soccer and rode their bikes while we got the camper set up, then a quick dinner and campfire, and it was off to bed.

Day Three: Pancake Bay
On Saturday, we went on a two hour hike on a beautiful trail around the campsite. There were a number of completely different ecosystems on this trail, mainly forests, but some parts were more rocky, and then
it opened up into a “fen”, which is apparently the same as a bog except that fresh water flows through it, so you get different kinds of plant and animal life. The boys walked the whole way (they’re too heavy to carry, and I can only piggyback them for short distances now), and took turns walking Patches, which they seemed very excited about. We never managed to get to the beach, though it looked pretty nice. After dinner, John crafted a perfect marshmallow-toasting campfire, and we were all asleep by 10:30.

To be continued….