Iain Leitch Photography

The weekend after the Canada Day Long Weekend my wife and I went camping at Presqu'ile Provincial Park. We had never been to this park before and it is about a three hour drive from our home in Ottawa. However, one of our goals this summer is to go to new provincial parks, and this was one of them. We stayed just one night at site 177 in the Craig's area of the campground.  Once we got to the park we discovered that there were still people on the site we had reserved but they explained that they had another site booked and the people had just left that one so they would be quick moving their stuff over to their new site. We opted to go for a hike instead of just waiting around.  We went to the Marsh Boardwalk which was a 1.3km trail which consisted mainly of the boardwalk but also two observation towers and a bit through a cedar forest.  Once we finished the hike we headed back to set up camp. This didn't take much time at all to do considering it consisted of setting up ...

 With Canada Day falling on a Tuesday this year, I figured I would make the most of it and take the Monday and Wednesday off to make myself a nice long weekend to go paddling in Algonquin Park. To me, there would be no better way to celebrate being Canadian than being eaten alive by bugs and getting sun burnt deep in the back woods. I had planned a five day trip for this long weekend staying one night on Pen Lake, two on Madawaska Lake, and then the final on Cyldegale Lake before heading back on Wednesday. Before I left, this seemed like a great plan but it was just not meant to be. Day 1  My first day of my trip started out great. I was on the water by 11am and only had a short 380 meter portage until I was on the lake I had booked for the night. I started off at the Rock Lake access point and had a nice paddle down the lake until I needed to turn West and was hit by a wall of wind and 2 foot high waves. I tried to battle through this, as all I needed to do was get around a p...