Hi, I'll just finish up about my first camping trip in Algonquin Park. At some point one day, I noticed clouds gathering and winds growing. I was alone in my two-man tent. The wind and rain began to come down harder than a drunk falling on the pavement. I remember laying inside my tent, darkness coming and thinking, "there's nothing I can do, so what should I so?" I decided to go to sleep. I'm not sure that's the best action to take in a storm but I thought that if a tree fell on me, I was inside my tent and wouldn't see it coming anyway. So I went to sleep.
The next day a couple of fellows came through. "You mean you spent the hurricane in this little pup tent?" One of them asked me. I assured him I had. "It flipped over a few campers in the campsite and did half a million dollars damage to the towns." I felt very lucky when he said that, as I still do today. They moved on to their hike and I settled back to enjoy the feeling of having survived.
It was a nice day now. Hot and blue skies. Sometime around noon a couple of old people came to swim in the lake. It made me wish I was swimming but I had no one to save me if I started to drown so I didn't go near the water.
I looked forward to my rice; by now all my mashed potato flakes were gone. It's funny in the woods when you bring your own food how bland meals begin to seem tasty to you. Brown rice was now my favorite meal. I ate it without butter or any topping. That night, when I went to bed, I found I had a 'pizza attack' I could not think of anything else but having a pizza. I wanted to phone out but of course there's no phone at Provoking Lake. I slept and in the morning decided to hike into the store and buy some food. I hoped the the money I had, that I'd spilled mosquito repellent on, would be accepted by the store. Mosquito repellent takes the ink off of the money.
I enjoyed the hike in, even though I was anxious to have something really tasty. I bought peanut butter and cookies and a few other things and hiked back. Some people had set up a camp when I got back. Three young girls. I opened my peanut butter and found that although I hadn't seen any squirrels up to that time, peanut butter brought them all to my camp. They were aggressive, they probably didn't get peanut butter too many times, and wouldn't leave me alone when I ate it. I did put some out for them but that made it worse, they got bold and would crawl on me just to get some of it.
I have since read that there are few things that can resist peanut butter and let me just say that it makes the best trap for cockroaches. I unfortunately lived in a place with roaches. I found that if you put an empty peanut butter jar half-filled with water and peanut butter on the insides, by the time you wake in the morning, Your jar will be full of drowned roaches because they can't resist peanut butter.
Back to my trip. From then on, I had to fight with squirrels to eat my breakfast and lunch. I spent a lot of time painting the scenery and reading the one magazine I'd brought with me. A MAD magazine. They had a spoof of the movie 'Tootsie' in it and I read it over and over again. I hadn't seen the movie but thought the spoof was funny.
Time to leave came up on me. I didn't want to carry so much out, so I dumped my Quaker Oats out for the chipmunks. I found I was carrying quite a lot of weight anyway but did manage to make it out finally. It was slow going. I camped for one night at a roadside campsite, eight dollars a night back then, and in the morning caught a ride to Toronto. It's the opposite direction of Ottawa but I hadn't been there for a while and wanted to visit the zoo.
The people driving me were very nice and bought me a soda to drink on the way. They dropped me off downtown and I made my visit. I caught a greyhound bus home two days later. I rented a room in a building and picked up the stuff I had in storage. I would go again in two years and have many other experiences. That's all for now. I will write of the next trip later.
See ya.
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