monkeymartian

I’m back from a 10 day camping trip with the Family. This was our first time camping with a 1 year old, and it added some complications, but big sister E and little brother e had a great time. I stopped worrying about how much dirt e was ingesting after a couple of days and my mental state improved.

In the past, I’ve normally eschewed ‘car’ camping in favour of backpacking or canoe ‘backcountry’ trips. I’m sure some people can do these with small kids, but we just weren’t up to it. We had our hands full as it was.

We stayed at Bon Echo Provinical Park, north of Napanee Ontario. This place is listed as a natural environment type park, and while there are walk-in and hike-in sites, it offers hundreds of drive-up sites. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) our site was pretty removed from the ‘main’ campground. This necessitated a drive of 15-20 minutes to get to stuff like the beach, visitor centre and all that. Not including the three hour trip from home-to-park, and a couple of trips into town, we ended up putting more kms on the car than a normal work week. Strange but true. The distances would be marginal for biking towing the kids. Not that we could have fit the bikes on the car or anything, mind.

The park offers lots of programs for young and old. Mornings were occupied by the children’s educational programs (I learned a lot of stuff too — did you know turtles hibernate under the ice in the winter with their heads buried in the muck and breathe with their, erm, bums?). Afternoons were split between harrasing the snakes and turtles at the visitor centre, making crafts at the Chaplain’s cabin, and soaking in Mazinaw Lake. In the evenings after dinner the park naturalists put on some very interesting presentations at the amphitheater. These were very well done.

On the natural environment thing. It was hard to grab a piece of solitude, as the lake is very, very busy. We took a tour boat operated by the Friends of Bon Echo to view the pictographs on the rock face, where it was explained that the cliff was a very important spiritual symbol for the peoples that had dabbed red ochre on the rock. It was sometimes hard to hear the guide as motor boats towing all manner of toys and sea-doos rushed by. Strange how a spiritual place has become a playground (and I guess I’m just as guilty for this).

All in all it was a good vacation, and it was nice to get the kids out of the city for a while. The experience has left me thinking about the canoe trips I’ve done with friends and family in places like Killarney and Alqonquin. I’m also reminded of backpacking trips at Lake Superior and the Bruce Trail. When the kids are older, I think I’d like to do some of this again. If I’m up to it!