vacation – camping

How dee do faithful readers.  I have more photos this time that I’m sure you will appreciate.  We did indeed have action packed adventures as I promised in the last post.  But here it is in an organised fashion.

I finished up summer school/camp and it went well.  We had a lot of positive feedback from the parents and the kids seemed to enjoy themselves so all we well.  Of course, we haven’t gotten paid from that as usual.  But if things go as per usual, we will be eventually.  Three nagging emails ought to do it.

We also had the excitement of a giant (yet only 15-20 minutes) storm that knocked down lots of trees.  That meant we were camping in our house for 3 days with no power and no water.  At least it wasn’t as long as last summer when we were without power for 5 days.  And since we were preparing to go camping this time, all our gear was out and ready to go so that was handy.  The only down downside (other than the annoyance of no power in general) was that it was sooooooo hot those three days. That made sleeping difficult and not a good way to start an active vacation.  Goodness gracious was there ever a heatwave.  But upon returning from a long walk, we saw the streetlights on and were delighted.

Right after all that was done, and we we went to church on Sunday, we left to go camping.  We got as far as my parents in Rochester, Minnesota and stayed overnight.  We had looked at the forecast when we were in South Bend, but we thought maybe we’d get a more accurate forecast when we were closer.  Upon checking, it seemed as though there was going to be 100+ degree heat and severe storms.  We almost decided not to go.  But when I phoned the outfitters we would be using, they said the forecast in their exact region was for lovely temperate weather.  We hemmed and hawed, but decided to go in any case.  You can decide for yourself whether or not that was a good idea.

We then left my parents’ place (Dad doing quite well by the way, thank you), and drove and drove and drove to just north of Ely, Minn to an outfitter I highly recommend.  Canadian Border Outfitters.  All we got from them was canoe, pfds and paddles, but they strapped our canoe to the top of a motor boat, and transported us across the first lake to our first portage.  That was great because it was a huge lake and would have taken us forever and it was already 6pm.  We camped in the first site we came to. Here are some views.

The countryside looked a lot like the places we always camp in mid-northern Ontario.  The thing that was odd was that the water was a LOT warmer even though the Boundary Waters is a lot further north than Algonquin in Ontario.  But that was great because we could never really swim in Ontario because it was too cold.  We saw and heard lots of loons which made us homesick for Ontario, but no other wildlife of any kind except a few fish and frogs.  Not even a turtle.  Oh we did see a chipmunk.  There were not very many mosquitoes at all, but we managed to camp on the only site that still had blackflies left.  (Not the one above, a different one.)

Jan took to camping like a loon to a lake.  In that photo, he is making “smoke” with his monster truck in the dirt.  He is completely filthy.  He slept between us in the tent and liked it just fine.  He seemed to sleep fine, although David and I didn’t, but not because of him, just because of nature noises.  If you camp, you know what I mean.

I woke up the next morning to the realisation that we didn’t have any sunscreen with us.  This was a tremendous frustration because I spent so long planning this trip and even had two bottles sitting out that somehow didn’t make it into the packs.  And of all the things to forget…. sigh.

The next day we paddled a bit and Jan spent a lot of time hanging over the side trailing his upper half in the water.  This was difficult to make forward progress, but since he was having fun, we just plowed on and compensated.  He had been lent a tiny paddle by the outfitters which was good because he felt involved, but bad because it belonged to her (outfitter’s) daughter and we were anxious not to lose/damage it, so we spent a lot of time nagging him not to drop, damage it.  This led to a lot of yelling and nagging.  Sigh.  Probably not the best parenting, but we did have good times too.  We ended the paddling somewhat early and camped at a decent site.  We sat around and read and swam and had good times. Here are some views of that.

If you notice the tarp over the tent in the first photo, it’s because it looked like rain.  Sure enough, that night it poured.  Lightening, thunder, the whole bit.  Jan slept, but David and I spent the time praying a tree wouldn’t fall on the tent.  It didn’t and we are here to tell the tale.

That did mean that the next morning it was cooler to start.  That was a good thing because we started the day with the longest of 7 portages.  Yep, that’s right, 7.  Several of them were not very long, but there was a lot of elevation change and the trails were not terribly well maintained so somewhat difficult to walk on.  Some of the put-ins and take-outs were just horrendous.  As you’ll see from the photos, one of the put-ins even started with a “bridge” over a marsh.  Very difficult to use.  That’s also the one (I think) where somehow a bag floated off and David had to wade/swim out and get it.  Sigh.   I’ve done an awful lot of camping and never had that happen before.  So, yes, they were difficult conditions.  Having another person (especially one who couldn’t really carry anything worth mentioning) along meant carrying a lot more gear so we had to do each portage twice.  We think we calculated that we walked 6.5  kms that day. We only paddled marginally more than that, about 10, maybe 12 kms.

It was decent weather to start, as I said, but at some point, it warmed up dramatically.  This meant that at some point we were really really hot and with no sunscreen, this wasn’t good.  By the time we got to our campsite for the evening, I was so hot I basically collapsed.  I think I had some mild heat exhaustion.  I couldn’t speak properly, I spent a lot of time in the woods by the thunderbox and I just couldn’t hardly stand up.  At one point I stripped off all my clothes and basically fell into the water.  That helped briefly, but it was an extremely hot campsite with little wind and no shade.  And this was the site with the blackflies.   Eventually I felt better but I couldn’t go to sleep until the sun went down because the sun was shining directly on to my side of the tent and it was just hotter than a sauna in there.  It was a very difficult evening.  After we finally fell asleep the wind we had been so desperately wishing for picked up in the extreme.  So it was very noisy.  Here are some photos of that day and site.

The wind was still whipping like mad the next morning.  There were no portages this day, thankfully, but we had camped at one end of a long lake that we had to get across.  We knew that if we were to get across this lake at all, it was going to be very very difficult with that wind.  We made the decision at that point that we were already exhausted and guaranteed to only be more exhausted after the upcoming paddle.  Also, of course, we still didn’t have any sunscreen and we were all fairly sunburned. (David much less so than Jan and I because he had a long-sleeved swim-shirt that he wore the entire time.  Unless Jan and I wore heavy sweatshirts, we didn’t have long-sleeves.)  BUT, if we could make it to the other end of the lake, we would be at the pick-up point.  However, it would be a day earlier than the outfitter was planning to pick us up so we would just hope we could come up with something.

We only have one photo of this day after it was all over.  This is because it was one of the most difficult days, physically speaking, I have ever endured.  I think have have rarely been so exhausted (and I’m sure the other times were also during camping trips.  Why do I keep doing this??!)  There were 2.5 foot waves from the blistering wind.  This is absolutely NOT something you should EVER canoe in unless you are pretty darn experienced, which fortunately we are.  However, it was still extremely difficult.  Many times, the bow of the canoe, where I was, was up in the air and then slammed down at the bottom of the wave.  I was never really convicted that we would flip over, but many times I thought maybe so much water would come over the bow that we would have to start bailing which would be pretty darn difficult with the wind pushing us around that much. Additionally, there was a cross-wind that made aiming into the centre of the waves very tricky.  Sometimes we were working against each other because we were aiming at different waves. Many times we looked at the shore in despair and realised that we hadn’t moved in 10 minutes.  A distance that would have taken us 45 minutes maybe, took 4 hours.  Jan sat in the bottom of the canoe and just held on.  He was soooo well-behaved.  I think he realised how dangerous things were.  Later he said that was his favourite part.  No fear, that kid. When we finally got to still-water, I burst into tears because I was so exhausted.  But we got to the boat-launch and there was an outfitter, not ours, dropping a group off and he said he’d drive us to our outfitter for no charge.  Praise the Lord!!  So that was the end of the camping trip.  We drove into town, checked into a hotel and ate ice-cream.  Here we are at the end of the trip: