Our Best Canada vacation

by Kari
(NJ)

Our best Canada vacation was last summer. My husband and I decided to try a more adventurous vacation so we decided to go canoe camping in Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada.

We rented a canoe and a couple packs and brought as little as we thought we could get away with.

This included our tent, two sleeping bags (ours were kind of large, next time we will invest in smaller ones as ours took up a lot of space in our packs), a one-burner stove and fuel, snacks such as trail mix and protein bars, dehydrated food, a small saw, etc.

We had never done this before but were felt we were prepared.

The first day we canoed and portaged for about 4-5 hours across a few lakes and rivers until we reached our first campsite on Burnt Island Lake. We were exhausted!

We set up camp and had some dinner and discovered that the dehydrated food wasn't half bad. By the time the sun set we were more than ready to go to bed.

The second day we just spent time canoeing around the lake (it was quite large) investigating and fishing. I didn't catch anything but the hubby caught a couple small mouth bass.

It started to rain our second evening just as we were finishing up cooking supper, so we ended out spending the rest of that evening hanging out in the tent.

We woke to sunny skies the third day and were thinking that this could be the best Canada vacation ever. We had to pack up as we were off to another lake that day.

It was about a three-hour trip (including a one kilometer portage that we had to make two trips on to take all our gear) and except for briefly getting lost (who knew we were supposed to go OVER the beaver dam?) it was a relatively easy day.

Our site for that night was perfect! It was large and beautiful. We were facing west and really enjoyed watching the sun set that night.

On our last morning we could see rain coming again so decided to hurry up and get going. Of course it started to pour while we were going which really sucked!

We were drenched, our packs were drenched and the canoe was filling up with more water than I would've preferred. Fortunately we had a pail for bailing out the water.

The only good thing about the rain was when passing a small bay we came across a large bull moose feeding in the water. That was quite the experience. It was HUGE!

We finally got back to the original lake we had started from and met up with a huge wind.

What should've been a one-hour trip across the lake took more like two with large waves occasionally crashing over the front of the canoe (where I was of course).

We finally made it back to shore and learned that the park officials had had to rescue five canoes that day, and we weren't one of them. That made us feel really good.

We sort of felt like we needed a vacation after that vacation., but really, it was an incredible time.

Despite the trials, it was still our best Canada vacation trip and we are going back again this summer.

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