Out on the Bay

I'm still catching my breath from the mini-vacation that DW and I took. And yes, there was camping involved.

As I stated on Tuesday, we set out on Saturday morning and headed northwest, past North Bay, on several highways in several states of wear and tear, south of Sudbury and to the north shore of Killarney Provincial Park. The drive is more than six hours through some beautiful Ontario countryside and unique towns.

By the time we arrived at George Lake and set up camp, it was nearing dinner time. We had made a lengthy stop, in North Bay, for lunch and to pick up milk and beer (essentials, all), and sometimes we were caught behind some slow-moving traffic with nowhere to safely pass. We cooked some homemade burgers with homemade Greek and potato salads, washed down with cider and the aforementioned beer.

With dinner out of the way and our dishes washed and stowed away, we were ready to relax and officially start our vacation.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I'm still catching my breath from this trip, even though we returned home late on Tuesday night and I wrote this post some 16 hours after unloading the car and putting everything away. We had packed so many activities into this four-day getaway that I'm still processing everything we did, so today I'll leave you with what we did on our first evening and I'll share some of our other experiences, tomorrow.

Our site was located in an inner circle at the very end of the radio-free zone of the George Lake campground, but we could see through our neighbour's site to the lake and sunset. It was also a very short walk to the beach area and the launch zone for canoes and kayaks. I'll mention more about this spot, tomorrow.

The main reason that we chose Killarney Provincial Park was that we wanted to get our kayaks out onto Georgian Bay and explore the myriad islands to the south. But on our first evening, we just wanted to see the massive expanse of this vast body of water that, in my opinion, should be one of the Great Lakes. And to do this, we packed up our cameras and headed a few kilometres further down Highway 637, to Chikanishing Trail.

This two-kilometre loop had us scrambling over the smooth, pink rocks and through dense forest, past Chikanishing Creek, which leads out to Georgian Bay. With sunset on our heels, the views were breathtaking. Looking far out on the bay, the water and sky seemed to come together into an endless void.

With the sun below the horizon and only about half of the trail loop completed, we had to scramble to get back to our car, lest we get caught in the woods after dark (DW, who is always prepared, forgot a flashlight: I had one in my camera bag, but didn't tell her until we reached the car—we still had plenty of natural light).

Back at camp, we set a fire and enjoyed drinks while we plotted out the coming days. Our first full day nearly killed me.

Stay tuned...