The plan was to keep everything minimal: eat only hot dogs, sleep on mats instead of air mattresses, etc. to keep costs and space in one vehicle as low as possible. The problem with this, is that when it rains all night and morning on the first day, there's nothing to do cooped up in a tent and everything that sat on the ground is wet. So Brent and Allie spent the morning polishing off a bag of goldfish crackers in the most inventive ways possible.
This is the smiley-fish-killer
And the three-fish school attack
The first night was filled with guitar playing, card games, and philosophical chatter over various alcoholic-type beverages smuggled in in water bottles due to the alcohol ban. Brent has a story to continue that later ahahaha.
That night, one of the girls fell asleep at the picnic table after everyone else had retreated to tents. Out of the darkness you hear one of the guys: "I'm coming to save you! Don't move! You're surrounded by raccoons!" And sure enough, the campsite was marauded all night long by a whole pack of the little rabid beasties. And a squirrel accomplice who fell in the garbage bag after the ruffles chips.
Aside from Allie's cousin's girlfriend who ate granola bars and rice chips all weekend, everyone else feasted on charry hot dogs till their hearts and stomachs were content. Sunday and Monday, however, the sight of another dog or a jalapeno and cheese sausage was enough to make anyone vomit. Enough hotdogs already!
Good thing we brought some canned stews and chef boyardee, which we happily indulged in at room temperature... on the beach!
All the hot dogs and chips and May 24 celebratory beer were easily worked off by Brent and Allie who were really the only ones in the group that wanted to DO anything except sit around the fire all weekend. We hiked almost thirteen kilometres of trails, but the Nippissing was our favourite.
It had more stairs and sandy hills than you can count!
But we stopped to hug trees in the regrowth forest.
And there was a really cool promontory with a view to die for.
Where we left our mark among the thousands of others before us, then headed back to camp... but not before eating a wildflower or two!
Amid all this hiking, and running up and down some huge sand dunes (those pictures are on Brent's phone....) we stopped a bunch of times at the beach. The one night, after making friends with some rowdy kids from Watford and doing a bit of a polar bear dip in the freezing, calm water, we decided to head back to camp before we caught the chills. Unfortunately, everyone else had abandoned us, and we were left to navigate our way back to camp in the dark.
As Murphy's law would have it, every turn we made was wrong and the twenty-minute walk turned into almost three hours of stumbling, blind, down some service roads outside of the campground. Cold, footsore and a little freaked out at the strange noises one can hear in the brush in the night, we FINALLY made it back to camp at 2:30 in the morning after mentally drafting our own version of the Blair Witch Project done as a zombie flick with post-apocalyptic abandoned toll-booths and discarded trucks and possibly set in a campground very similar to the one we were in.... okay, so the pitch darkness gets to you a little.... lol....
The rest of the weekend can be summed up in a whole bunch of shenanigans including bug gladiator battles:
(you can't see them, but there's a nest of red ants going at a caterpillar in the "ring" and Brent is, to no surprise, provoking them with a stick. )
Wrestling and jumping down dunes taller than small apartment buildings:
Lots of peeing in the bushes, too many hot dogs, and Brent and Allie licking a slug which was reported to make your tongue go numb -- and it did!!!! Videos of that to come...
And Brent acquired himself a whole slew of new names:
Meet...
Brent, Derek, Christian/Paul, and Dick Cheese (don't ask...)
Monday morning, before we headed home, Allie won out and got to go canoeing like she'd been begging to since the snow melted. Once we hauled ass beyond the boring touristy folk and left Allie's cousins behind to search for turtles along the bank and not paddle at all, we created a natural obstacle course including over logs, under logs, between lilies, across sand bars, speedy 360-degree maneuvers, and a game of chicken with a goose which we actually lost. Goofing around like that, the hour of rental time really wore out our arms! But we got some good pictures, so it was worth it.
We thought life jackets would make us look like Iron Man, but it's more like the Michelin Man...
And now that this entry is getting ridiculously long and full, we'll let you go dream of your own camping trip now... we have mugs to wash and sleeping bags to dry out!
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