Algonquin Backpacking - Highland Trails - Day 2

The nice thing about being able to sleep with just the screen door closed  is that you can also wake up to as beautiful a view as the one you went to sleep to. The pink and blue sunrise is what I opened my eyes to on this morning. 

I awoke to the sounds of a woodpecker knocking on a nearby pine tree. 

I got up and sat by myself for awhile in the quiet solitude of the morning waiting for Heather and my mom to wake up. A solitary loon was also enjoying the peacefulness of the morning.

​Our plan for today was to leave our stuff here and hike the 15 or so minutes over to the next set of campsites and see how we liked them. If there was one there that we liked then we would come back here, pack up our stuff and move sites.

 According to the website reservation system that we checked there was going to be 4 other sets of people on these campsites. Since it is first come first serve, we wanted to get ahead of the game by getting first pick before anyone else showed up. 

By 10:15 a.m. we were on our way over to the next set of sites being careful not to step on the little brown toads that we frequently saw along the paths. 

When you aren't carrying backpacks you are able to travel faster so it didn't take us long to get there. There was no one on these sites yet and we had first pick. Once again there was a site that was no where near the lake and we discounted it right away. The next two were quite nice, but once again the third one was the best. 

The previous site was more open than this one but the ground was more dusty and there wasn't as much privacy like this one had. This one also had more deciduous trees so there was more shade to relax in. On the other site you had to travel through other people's campsites to get to the boom box. But this one had a boom box of it's own. We decided that we liked this site better than the one we were on and that we would move here. 

Besides, since we had to travel about 7 km the next day to the campsites on the other side of the lake then staying at this campsite would bring us just a little bit closer to tomorrow's destination.  So we hiked back to camp, packed up and moved camp over to the new site. 

Heather and I set up our tent in a nice open area with a decent amount of shade. 

My mom found a spot for her screen tent under the trees nearby. She set up her fly a little differently today. That is the nice thing about her type of tent. It is fairly flexible to accommodate different sorts of terrain. The downfall is that it needs trees. So if you are in an area that doesn't have good trees then you are out of luck.

After the tents were up we needed wood to get a fire going for coffee. So we went exploring our new surroundings to see what we could find. 

It was while we were exploring that my mom came across another campsite that we had completely missed. Apparently the one we had seen that was no where near the water was not an official campsite and was just one someone had created as a makeshift site. This hidden campsite my mom stumbled upon was one of the nicest we had seen yet. It was huge and the benches were hand made from logs and one even had a little table attached to it. We wondered if there was another hidden site in the area we were in yesterday. But we weren't about to go back again to look. And we weren't about to pack up camp to move to this one either. We were happy enough with the site we already had and we went back to enjoy our time there. 

We spent the rest of the day swimming, reading, napping and just relaxing in the sun. 

 Once again there were loons swimming close by the campsite. They were never far off.
​     Across the lake we could hear the people with the dogs from yesterday. They too had moved campsites and we could see them as teeny tiny ant like shapes right across from us.  The site they were now on, according to the map, was not one that was an official site on the map. We figured that they were on an unreservable one that was intended for canoers and that they probably had a canoe with them. 
​    Later in the evening we heard a couple of campers take up the camp site right next to us. They were quiet and we hardly even noticed that they were there. 

For supper we had noodles with beef and broccoli. And for dessert we decided to experiment with the bannock mix and try to make cinnamon rolls out of them. 

The cinnamon rolls turned out pretty good! It didn't take us long to eat most of them. We made way too many of them so some we put away until breakfast. 

In the evening we played Yahtzee and games of Hearts. The frogs started to come out and serenade us with their chorusing songs. There were plenty of fish jumping in the lake beside us.  Unfortunately at about the same time, the mosquitoes and the no-see-ums came out to bite us.

When it started to get dark, the moon started to rise. The campsites on the lake were much more busy than the previous night. From across the lake we could see the flashlights of other campers flitting across the lake. Instead of star gazing we were flashlight gazing. We made it a relatively early night since we knew that we had a long day of hiking ahead of us tomorrow and we wanted to be packed up and gone by 9 a.m. 
​  We were supposed to get rain tomorrow so we were not able to sleep with the tent door open this night.