Well, we survived our island camping adventure
It was a lot of fun and nobody died, which as nice
Friday afternoon, I loaded up a canoe and went alone to drop supplies off on an island we wanted to try camping on. When I got to the island however, I found that a nearby cement plant was way too loud to camp there, so I unloaded my provisions on the island and proceeded to paddle back upstream to the drop in point. After about three hundred yards, it was clear I would never get back in time to meet my wife there with another canoe and other supplies – so I went across the river and docked the canoe. From there I hiked up a hundred ft incline to a railroad track, caught my breath, then continued up another two hundred foot incline to a road, where I called my wife to let her know where to pick me up.
Once we got back together, we gathered the rest of our supplies and a second canoe and headed to the drop in point. There we went down river to where I had docked the first canoe. I picked it up and we went to the island where I dropped our supplies. We decided to pick up the supplies and head another hour down river to another island (which we had camped on before) – it was dark by the time we had loaded up and so we took a surreal moonlit canoe trip down a river to our island. We set up camp and were to bed around 1:00am.
It rained that night, which isn’t a problem due to a superior tent and having all the right gear for such an event. But our tarp (which we had hung over our camp had blown down on one side, due to the stakes being in sandy soil with no holding power. That and the fact that our site was on the pebbly rock strewn flood plain of the river (basically a dry river bed) we decided to move our entire camp to a better spot in the morning with the daylight. So we did and I got soaked setting up our tarp in the new spot. Once the tarp was up and I was dripping wet, it stopped raining and didn’t again for the entire campout. Nice.
Anyway. We went down river that afternoon, got picked up an portaged to the drop in point again, where we picked up the rest of our family (and my mom) to bring them down river to our island campsite. It was pretty neat seeing my one-year old’s reaction to all the new and interesting stuff she got to see/experience on the trip for the first time.
That night the temp dropped to 33 degrees, but we were toasty warm in our tents and mummy sleeping bags, including the little one who was snuggled in between Ladyzerka and I in our zipped together mummy bags.
The next day, after canoeing and such, we took everyone to down river to the drop off point, then Lady Z and I canoed back to the island and hung out till 6:00pm, befor loading everything up and coming in for pick up and portage home.
Lots of fun.
BZ
