Home At Last

Well, it is true. Sane people should probably not try to camp for 10 days with 1 year old twins (and a 5 year old and a rather large dog). People who have long ago (say a year...) lost their sanity should go ahead and do it, since they have nothing to lose! It was wonderfully exciting to hit the road and see new terrain these last 10 days, and it was a very special trip of firsts for Brendan. Among the highlights were the sort of memories that great nostalgic movies are made out of like learning to ride your bike without the training wheels (he's a very quick learner!), first rescue pet (Brendan found an injured dragon fly and "nursed it back to health" - it "flew away" on the third day after Brendan found it) and those first tastes of freedom (there was a swing set within sight of our first campsite that we let him go to if he returned at a specified time on his watch - he did beautifully, very law abiding, this kid). We roasted marshmallows on the fire, and weiners, played on the beach for hours (we were lucky enough to have been able to reserve campsites 100 feet from the beach at both campgrounds), read bedtime stories beside the campfire and stayed up late. Doesn't it sound so idyllic?!

Our only real downer of the trip was the constantly impending rain. For essentially the entire trip the weather was in a state of "will it or wont it". As a result we were constantly setting up outside for lunch; high chairs, cooler, food, water and then deciding two hours later that it was about to start raining so we'd put it all away again. After repetition number 100, that got old, but it was very, er, cramped in the trailer so trying to all cram in there was hardly a better option. We found some creative solutions to our space issue; instead of the bulky double stroller, we turned our side by side bike trailer into a multipurpose stroller, bike trailer, place to lie down and have a bottle, luggage carrier combo. We tried a variety of sleeping arrangements and eventually slept with Blaze tucked under the main bed (the folded down sofa), Brendan in the upper bunk, one baby in a playpen and one baby under the kitchen table with a gate across the two benches to enclose that area. Trying to attend to that crying baby in the middle of the night required some fairly advanced gymnastics, but believe it or not it was preferable to the gymnastics required to squeeze around the second playpen when it was set up. It also meant you could open the door to the bathroom. Yay for portapotties! Outside we set up two tents; one for Brendan to play in with his toys and another for the babies to play in. The baby tent essentially worked as a giant mosquito proof playpen and worked amazingly. We did occasionally let the babies out to explore on their own, but they got so filthy so quickly, and ingested so many pine cones that it hardly seemed worth it.

Harrison grew his first top tooth a few days into the trip and finally had the second top tooth poke through this morning. That makes four teeth for each of them now! Heidi is sporting quite a gap, which just adds to her not-so intellectual look. (:

The twins had some not bad nights of sleep and a some fairly horrible nights, thanks I think in large part to those teeth (Heidi is working on the upper tooth, left of the middle pair). Naps were rough too... but enough complaining!

We left at 4 am, in a desperate attempt to find a way to make driving to Northern Ontario more manageable. We stopped once for an hour to feed the babies breakfast in the camper around 7 am near Port Perry and then didn`t have to stop again until we arrived at Marten River Provincial Park (45 minutes north of North Bay) about 11:30. Northern Ontario before noon! We may leave at 4 am everywhere we go! Martin River is on the southern border of the Temagami area; very pretty, with lots of Eastern White Pine, and very reminiscent of Algonquin or Killarney. We did a great hike on our third day here through the forest to a 300 year old pine. I had bought a new camera (yeah for Shoppers Optimum Points) with a fancy panorama feature that I made good use of with all these tall, tall trees, and wide forest vistas. We stayed here for 4 nights and then headed onto Ivanhoe Lake Provincial Park for another 4 nights. This was a full days drive north through Timmins through all sorts of places I've always heard of like New Liskeard, Kirkland Lake (where Rob's grandfather lived for a while) and Matheson (where my grandfather worked for a while) so that was very cool. The scenery was nothing like what we expected. Around New Liskeard it was positively prarie-like, and the pictureasque Canadian Shield abruptly ended north of Temagami and didn't start again until we were driving home. All the areas north were full of white Silver Birch forests, and Ivanhoe Lake itself was full of sand dunes, moss and lichen. So, we've had to adjust our mental picture of Northern Ontario... isn't that what travel is all about! Sadly, we weren't able to connect with our cousins in Timmins, they had a wedding to attend, but we kept ourselves busy with bike rides, hikes and more trips to the beach. We even did made bannock on the fire (see picture) in a ranger led program. Finally, it was time to head home. We'd had some hope that we might be able to cover the distance in one day, but realized that was both unrealistic and inhumane to the poor kids in the backseat (especially Blaze), so we stopped at an awesome KOA in Parry Sound, that as you can judge from the previous post almost had us excited to stay on the road an extra day. Sadly, amusement parks are less amusing in the rain, so we drove over to Huntsville to ride their Steam Train instead for the twins birthday, and then hit the highway for home. I have to say, it was a wonderful trip, but by the home stretch I don't think a single one of the 6 of us wanted to be in that truck one minute more.

Fianlly about 10 oclock last night we made it Home Sweet Home. Hallelujah.