Trip Log: Silent Lake Provincial Park, July 1-2, 2014

This was just a quick over night trip, unfortunately.  A few days before, we'd gone to Silent Lake for a day trip with my parents, just to have a picnic and let the kids swim.  The kids loved it there and decided they wanted to go back right away.

We arrived around 2pm, and picked out a site in the Granite Ridge Campground.  We'd stayed in the Pincer Bay Campground before and wanted to check out the other area.  After setting up the tent, Chris and the kids drove down to the beach and I walked Biscuit down to the canoe launch near our site.  From there, we followed the Lakeside Trail to the Pincer Bay beach, where I watched them swim and jump off the floating dock from a shady little rocky shallows.  The floating dock was one of the kid's favourite parts of this trip.  No other parks that we've been to have them, and none of the beaches we go to do either.

Once we got back to the site and I set up my new clothes line. SEA TO SUMMIT LITELINE CLOTHESLINE is meant more for backpacking or canoe camping, but I really wanted to try it out.  It worked REALLY well!  It attaches easily to trees by looping around and clipping back onto the rope.  The centre section of the line is two ropes and a bunch of black beads that you can use to squeeze the corners of things like dish towels.  It got pretty windy and nothing blew away.  I'll be honest, I didn't think it would work very well, and I figured I'd have to take a few clothes pegs with me.  I'm so glad I was wrong.  It's also small, comes with a little carry pouch that's attached so it doesn't get lost, and would be perfect for canoe camping or backpacking.

Supper that night was penne with chunky vegetable tomato sauce.  I'd dried the sauce, and it was fine, tasted like it had before I dried it, but next time, I'll do the vegetables and sauce separate.  I think it would have come back better.  While dinner was cooking, we ended up eating banana wraps because we were all so hungry.  These are just whole wheat tortillas with either peanut butter, Nutella or chocolate peanut butter, wrapped around a banana.  It was sort of like dessert before dinner.

While I washed dishes, Chris took the kids down to the canoe launch to fish.  They didn't have so much as a nibble, but blamed it on the fact they couldn't fish from the dock.  A group of guys were sitting there drinking and chatting, so Chris took them a little further down shore to a rocky outcrop.  Biscuit and I came down after we finished cleaning up, and watched for a while, and we saw a HUGE garter snake.  It must have been 3 feet long at least.  It slithered into the crack in the rock, then poked its head out to watch us.

We had a fire for a while until the mosquitoes got bad, then we went into the tent and played a round of Crazy 8s and then a round of Yahtzee.  By around 11pm, we turned out the lights and fell asleep watching fireflies flying all around our tent.  At any given time there were about half a dozen.

The next morning, I got up early (didn't have my watch) and took Biscuit for a walk.  We saw a deer while on our little walk, then we crawled back into the tent and slept until about 9.  Everyone got up then and I made coffee (in my new GSI Ultralight Java Drip), oatmeal and made my first attempt at baking in the reflector oven.  We didn't have much wood so we couldn't get a good hot fire going, but I managed to make some kind of cinnamon roll that wasn't actually rolled.  It was tasty, once we finished cooking the bottom on the propane stove because it was taking so long with the piddly little fire we managed to make.

Since I was distracted with making the cinnamon layered pancake thing, I overcooked the 10 grain hot cereal I was making for Chris and I.  The kids decided to call it slop...though it wasn't really sloppy, more like how I imagine it would look if you course-chopped a few kinds of rice then cooked them.  Another problem I'd had was I took only the kitchen stuff I planned to take for canoe camping...and now realize one pot and no mixing bowl probably won't work.  The Bisquick came in a pouch that made 6 biscuits so I used that but it wasn't really big enough.  Maybe if I'd taken an extra Ziploc bag it would have been better.

By noon we were packed up and headed back to the beach so the kids could have one last swim before heading home.

Silent Lake Provincial Park is a beautiful park.  The sites are hit and miss, some are wonderful, some are just really small, but the beaches are wonderful, the privacy is mostly good, and there's enough to do to keep the family from getting bored.  We did hear highway noise at night, and there's no park store to buy things you might have forgotten, but it's still definitely a place we will go to again.

Trip Log: Silent Lake - June 2002

I have to admit, our first attempt to go camping was a complete disaster. Our daughter was only 18 months old, and we weren't really prepared. I think it was kind of a last minute thing, hey lets go camping tomorrow.

Our first mistake was to pick a walk in site. Not that there is anything wrong with a walk in site or with the WIS at Silent Lake, but we hadn't exactly prepared for that kind of trip. We'd tossed everything into the trunk of the car, I don't think we even had a backpack at the time. This meant hauling everything to the site in multiple trips...in June. The flies were horrible! Insane even, and because our daughter was at the stage where she wanted to walk rather than be carried, each trip in, for me at least, took four times as long thanks to her little legs.

For people with kids this young, choosing a site is more complicated than for people with older children. Not only do you want a site that's nice, fairly private and within reasonable walking distance to the bathrooms, but you need a site that isn't full of things for your toddler to trip on...or cliffs for them to fall off. Our site was right on the lake, which was nice, but it was rocky and if I'd let her walk on her own anywhere, she'd have been in trouble. This meant Chris had to set up the tent alone. It should be noted that Chris was a pretty experienced camper. His grandfather took him and his brother camping a lot when they were kids, but almost all of those trips were with a pop-up camper, so he didn't have a lot of experience putting up a tent. With the added annoyance of swarms of mosquitoes, it seemed to take forever.

Once the tent was up, we pretty much crawled in and hid from the bugs. Chris cooked (brave man) I think we had spaghetti and then tried his hand at fishing but the bugs were just too bad. When we got up, Bridie was fussy and only banging on pots and pans would keep her from crying. As we didn't want to piss off the other campers nearby, we ended up packing up and leaving. Bridie also had one eye swollen shut thanks to a mosquito who had bitten right on the corner of her eye.

Looking back, there were so many things we could have done to make the trip enjoyable. Picking a more appropriate site, taking bug repellant (God, what was I thinking?) and taking along toys designed for quiet play would have been a good start. But it was my first real camping trip since i was a kid (not counting pitching a tent in the back yard) and I learned a lot. We learned to take more time planning, and to come up with a list for packing (thus preventing the 40 minute drive to buy a can opener in the nearest town, only to find only one store open. The only can opener they had fell apart halfway through opening one can.) Every camping trip should be a learning experience though. I hope I never get to the point where it becomes humdrum and boring.