Day 2 - Chicks In The Stix 2018- Driftwood

The next day Penny and I drove in to the town of Deep River to get some dry firewood from a guy who was selling some along the roadside, Not only was the wood dry but we got more of it for what we paid for than we did from the park Office. 

​After that Penny, Julie and I decided to go for a hike on The Oak Highland Trails. This is actually two trails rolled into one. The Riverview Loop is 1 km long and the Beaver Pond Loop is 2.5 km, The Riverview Loop starts down by the boat launch.

The bugs were pretty bad and it was threatening to rain, so we donned our hoodies and headed into the woods.

The trails were fairly well groomed and for the most part were not too difficult to travel on. 

The markers for the Riverview trail are yellow and the markers for the Beaver Pond trail are blue. 

Despite the relative ease of the trail there were still a number of rocky out crops and a number of upward climbs. I guess that is part of the reason for naming the trail The Oak Highland Trail.

After awhile the Riverview Loop joins up and turns into the Beaver Pond Loop. That is when, through the trees, we started seeing groves of old dead birch trees standing out in meadows of marshy grasses.

One of the destination points on the trail is the Look Out.  Compared to the look out on the  "Look Out Trail" that we hiked last year in this park,  this one seemed much more like an actual look out. However, I have seen much better look outs than this one (Killarney Park has fantastic views on their trails). 

But all in all, this was still a nice view after going through the bugs in the thick bushes. We appreciated the breeze and the open space as we had a bit of a reprieve from the bugs if only for a few minutes. 

As we continued down the trail we found some very beautiful flowers, like the Sheep Laurel.

And some Blue Flag Iris

And Bunchberry flowers

There were also Wild Roses.

And even Lady Slippers. All of these flowers made the effort of the hike and the pestering of the mosquitoes worthwhile.  

Along the way we also saw a little brown toad in the leaves.

As we exited the trail we realized that we had started the trail at the end and finished it at the beginning. But the trail head was hidden at the back of a parking lot and was not really labeled as a trail head like the end of the trail was. 

We had to walk a little bit down the road to get back to where we parked our cars. 

When we got back Julie said that she wanted to go check out a geocache site that was back up on the trail. Apparently we had passed it on our hike. I had never been on a geocache excursion before but my uncle Willy had told me about it. So I was curious and wanted to go back into the trail to look for it with her. Penny didn't want to go though. We had parked our car near one of the main beaches and there were some picnic tables available so Penny stayed behind and waited for us at the beach.

On the way back up the trail we passed by a hollow tree. Inside, peeking out at us was a little chipmunk. It was hoping that we didn't see him. We let him be and kept going. 

It didn't take too long to find the geocache.

Inside was a trackable item and some other little trinkets. Julie wrote in the log and took the trackable item with her. This little adventure got me thinking that I would like to start doing this regularly. So a few weeks later I down loaded the app and created a profile under the name Wyvernbrew. 

On the way back out we took a different path than the one we had when we were with Penny. This brought us right past an area that told us why the trail is called the Beaver Pond Loop. 

At one spot there was a post with some information about the beaver pond.

We seemed to be standing below water level here. If we were to go and stand in front of the beaver dam the water level would probably be over our heads, or at least shoulder level.

We met back up with Penny and then headed back to camp to hang out with the rest of the girls. Everyone was just relaxing and some were trying to take a nap. All was well until the campsite next to us decided to turn their music up really loud. It was pretty annoying. It got to the point where I asked one of the guys if he could turn it down. That guy was pretty nice about it but when he went to turn it down some of the other people he was with got upset and became pretty rude about it. They didn't turn the music back up but for a long while we could hear them saying nasty things pretty loudly. It made us wish we had gotten site 41 like we  originally wanted. At least that would have put one more campsite between them and us. It wouldn't have made them any quieter though. We tried to ignore them as best we could and tried not to let it ruin the rest of our day. 

The sun was starting to sink lower as we prepared for supper. 

As we prepared supper we discovered a tiny little white fluff of a bug crawling around on the table. A little research told us that this little guy is a Woolly Aphid. 

Another insect we saw a lot of were fireflies. So when we found a number of these ugly little guys I had assumed that they were firefly nymphs. Turns out that they aren't firefly nymphs, although they do look somewhat similar to them. Instead these were ladybug nymphs. So in time Driftwood will have a healthy population of ladybugs.

We were fortunate enough to see a beautiful sunset.

Once the sun went down and supper was over we went into the dining tent and played board games and had a few laughs. 

Board games turned into shenanigans and there was much fun and laughter to be had. 

We ended the evening by sitting around the fire telling stories.