Wildly and warmly Canadian (and a messy eater too), my elder daughter is all smiles in the outdoors.
What’s more Canadian than camping? Let’s see: Tim Horton’s (that Canadian-then-
American-now-
Canadian-owned chain that serves underwhelming coffee and freshly-trucked-in doughnuts), hockey, maple syrup, cheese curds, poutine, canoes, tuques…The list goes on and on.
What better way to help celebrate Canada Day than to regale you with tales of camping?
For the first time in four years, it didn’t rain constantly for my family’s annual camping trip to Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park in Mattawa, Ontario. For my pre-camping whine-fest, go here.
There were moments during my 48-hour stint there that I actually had shorts on without becoming cyanotic or chewed into hamburger by marauding mosquitoes.
I think I’m actually smiling in some pictures. We were camping with an old high-school friend, her husband, her four children and her nanny. Not once was I tempted to beg her for Xanax (she’s a pharmacist, you see).
Our daughters go feral when camping. They joyfully embrace the dirt, water, fishing, card playing, biking and the relaxed standards of supervision.
Ready for both land and water pursuits, Little One pauses for a sip of juice.
The Little One stayed in her bathing suit, lifejacket and bike helmet about 14 hours a day. She wanted to be ready to bike or fish at a moment’s notice.
It was even warm enough for me to don my bathingsuit and go surfing down the gentler rapids of the Mattawa River with my children. The Mattawa River is a Canadian Heritage waterway that commemorates the original iron men—voyageurs. It’s hard not to think about how these tough little bastards were responsible for 540 pounds of cargo each and carried that cargo in 180-pound loads for each portage. Man, life in 17th-century France must have really sucked to make that sound appealing.
My paucity of vacation days actually worked to my advantage and I had to come into work on Monday. After a wake-up alarm at 4:30 a.m. my husband and I rolled out of our fetid sleeping bags, hopped into the van after a cursory swish of our respective toothbrushes, and made the three-hour journey back to Ottawa.
My mother-in-law, who was camping with us, held the fort in our absence. Oli had to come in for his final day of work (he’s a teacher), but would return to the campsite where he would continue camping until Thursday. So, I was dropped off at 8 a.m., stinking of campfire, sweat, sunblock and bug spray, and wearing the clothes I’d worn for the past two days.
I'm piloting precious cargo through the rapids. This was part of the same route voyageurs used hundreds of years ago.
Luckily, we have showers at work, so I could get cleaned up. It took a while–poking all that dirt down the drain with a stick is time consuming.
I heard it rained quite a bit in Mattawa after I left. That was a close one. Whew.
I’ll have more posts about our camping trips over the next few days (or so).
Tags: camping, Canada Day, Mattawa River, Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park
Rachelle makes her nanny go CAMPING? Hope she gets hazard pay for that. My filthy unbathed worm-juice-stained kids are at the rented cottage with my mother-in-law, which I will head back to tomorrow night after washing some clothes and gathering clean pajamas and emailing in my assignment. Camping, but…not. Although I did sleep on a couch last night and my neck is killing me. I’m tempted to say tell us when you’re going next year and we’ll join in, but… not.
I’m sure they’ve made some sort of danger pay arrangement for that. In fact, her nanny hopped aboard the air mattress and hurtled through the rapids not once, but twice!
That first photo is priceless, LOVE the hat!
sounsd like an awesome trip. but i like camping, so i might be a little biased.