The Long Dusty Road To Brent

   Brent campground in Algonquin Park is a place my family has been interested in checking out for a few years now, but had never gotten around to it. What we were most curious about was the hike around the rim of an old crater from a meteor that crashed thousands of years ago. Since Brent is not that far from home, we decided to take the time to visit it this year. 

​    The office itself is only about an hour away from where we live, but it is another hour drive from the office to the actual sites.

Only one person was allowed in the office at a time and you had to wear a mask while you were in there. 

The roads are narrow and  gravel ( and it is very loose gravel) with many winding curves . So unless you are in a big truck or are a fearless driver, the most you can go safely, is about 50 km per hour. Since the sites are 40 km away from the office, this makes for a rather long drive. The sites are remote enough that there is absolutely no cellular coverage anywhere in the campground. 

And on dry and sunny days, the dust on the roads is very thick which can make it hard to see. I was driving behind my brother and the air conditioning in my car is not working so I had to keep the windows rolled up in my car. It was sweltering by the time I got there. The dust was so thick that when I parked my car I could see the outline of my niece's hoodie here I had put it on the hood of my car to dry off earlier that day.  

I was sharing site 23 with my brother, Carsten and my sister-in-law, Penny. We had identical orange tents and we set them up side by side.

The sites were all very big, and very clean, and quite flat.
. 
The only thing we didn't really like about our site was that there was a small path that went right through our site that people were using to get from our section of the campground to the road on the other side of the campground. We put a stop to that  by hanging our clothes line right across the path. 

My parents had site 15 which is actually designed to be an RV site. When my parents reserved the site, they actually had an RV at the time. However, just days before we were to go camping, the RV was in an accident and could not be driven any longer. So instead we put up my brand new 10 man tent as well as my dining tent on their site. Their site was wide open and in a flat grassy area. 

​There are two different kinds of toilets in this campground. 

The one closest to my parents is wheelchair accessible. It is very clean and comfortable, but it is not a flush toilet. 

.The other one, that was close to our site, was the composting toilet. These types are my favourite, They are the same as the ones that are found in the Kiosk campground and are built high off the ground. they are built of cedar wood and they do not smell bad like the other toilets often do. They tend to smell more like cedar,

They get points for the composting toilets. they don't get points for the toilet paper though. The toilet paper was so thin that you could literally see through it. I never really understood the point of really thin toilet paper. People are just going to use more of it to compensate for the thinness. So, in my humble opinion, they may as well use toilet paper with a decent thickness. 

Since it is about an hours drive from the office, there are a couple of interesting systems put in place here that you don't tend to see in the other campgrounds in Ontario. For one, they have designated First Come First Serve sites.  For another, they have a Ministry truck that comes along once or twice a day with firewood in the back of it. They go from site to site asking campers if they need to buy firewood. I thought that was very good of them. 

Brent is known as a jump off point for many canoeists. As a result, the parking lot is often full and you can see many canoes coming and going. There is no real beach to speak of; only the area where the canoes take off from. Despite so many people using this as a jump off point, the park is very, very quiet. We were probably the noisiest ones there. 

Come to think of it, I don't think we were the noisiest ones there. I think this guy was, 

The beach / jump-off area is large with a number of picnic tables. 

To the far right is a dock and the trail head to Limestone Trail.

On the dock Powdered Dancer damselflies would land. 

In the water, little minnows swam around and muscles left trails in the sand. 

Between the rocks by the dock, some purple Bittersweet Nightshade was growing. 

But to the far left is where it is loveliest. There are a couple of benches nestled in among the trees.  People sit here to watch the sunset or to relax with a view of Cedar Lake. 

From here you can see the shore line and watch for the snapping turtle that both my mom and Penny saw swimming by every day. 

Or you can watch a couple of loons swim by. 

After we were all settled in and set up and had explored the place a little bit, it was close to sunset. The colours of the sunset were very pale and muted but had a soft, pastel beauty of their own. 

After supper, and it was starting to get dark out, we gathered together in the dining tent to play a few games of Qwirkle. Penny found herself to be the new found friend of a little brown moth. This moth was the jumpiest moth I ever did see. It was always near Penny and it loved to knock over her Qwirkle tiles. There were other moths in the tent too, but this one made us laugh and was by far, the most entertaining moth of the evening. 

Another visitor who was attracted to the light was a Black-ledged Sharpshooter Leafhopper. It was a rival in the competition for most jumpiest. However, the moth still won, hands down. 

As we headed off to our own tents at the end of the evening, the stars were out but we could see lightning off in the distance. We hoped that the storm was just passing by and that we wouldn't get hit with heavy rains during the night.