The post-camping post.

Well, I did it. I made it through the wilderness! Oh, I made it through-ooooo. My camping trip consisted of about 35 km of hiking on often hilly terrain in 48 hours. However, despite the scratches, the multitude of insect bites, the perspiration, the exhaustion, the sounds of large lumbering creatures in the night, the rain, the thunderstorms, and the dehydrated food, I think I'd do it again. Let's just see how long these mosquito bites torture me before making the final verdict.

We left Toronto fairly early on Friday morning, faced zero traffic, and got to Huntsville in good time. After looking around for a good brunch place, we settled on a good lunch place, and then had ice cream to fortify ourselves for the day. After we picked up our permit, we realized that we forgot to pack TP, so we drove a bit to a supply store in the park to pick it up.

While Steve was paying for it, the girl said "just so you know, this is final sale." I had to go hide behind a rack of coats to cover up my laughter. Seriously? TP is final sale? WTF? That's the kind of thing I want to return if it doesn't work out for me! Anyway, whenever the hiking was getting long, one of us would randomly say "do you think we can return the TP if we don't use it all?"

We had about 10 km to hike the first day, and got to our campsite in good time. I really liked the site because it had a nice beach where it was easy to get water, and nice lake views from where the tent was set up, but Steve found it creepy and gross that someone had left a bunch of broken coats/tarps/sleeping bags by a tree. I was able to ignore them because they had also left a comfy camp chair was also left on the site, which was really nice for fireside sitting. Here's a picture of the lake.

Here's a picture of the loon that was hanging out on the lake. At first he was really far away, but Steve was able to call him over so he was closer (talented boy). I named him Larry.

In the evening, we had a really nice campfire, and sipped some fortified orange Kool-Aid to make things more fun. Here's a shot of the fire.

We even went down to the beach where we could get an amazing view of the stars, and got to see some of the Perseids too. I think that was my first time seeing shooting stars. It was incredible to watch.

When we were almost ready to go to bed, we heard some loud noises in the woods near us, so we headed back to the beach area until they stopped. Steve was pretty sure it was a moose, and we heard it snort a couple times. It took a long time to pass by, and in the morning we could see the massive trail it left through the brush.

Anyway, Saturday was a more tiring day of hiking (15 km), and I didn't like the campsite as much. It didn't have random crap left behind, but the access to the water wasn't nice at all. Steve was clever enough to use a metal grate on the site in the water to make it a bit accessible to get drinking water. We had another fun night of dehydrated food and an abbreviated campfire. It started to rain, so we called it an early night, which was OK since we were both exhausted.

Of course, I can't say that I fell asleep right aways because we were in for another evening of large woodland creatures walking by our campsite. This time, they were going right through the site, and it sounded like there was one about four feet from the tent.

On Sunday, we had another 10 km of much easier hiking to do. When we had about 1.5 km left, it started to thunder and pour, but I kind of liked it because it made me feel less sticky. Thankfully it was very close to the end of the hike when the downpour occurred, because my shoes got soaked.

By the time we made it back to the parking lot, it was sunny. We sorted our stuff, and drove to Huntsville for a celebratory lunch of Harvey's and Dairy Queen. The nice thing about doing so much hiking is that you can eat unhealthy food after without feeling the least bit guilty.

And the worst part of the whole experience was driving through the awful cottage country traffic on the way back home to Toronto. I deeply hated anything that stood between me and a shower at that point.

And there you have it: the city girl survived the woods.