Murphy’s Point Provincial Park

July 20 - 21, 2018

After getting some practice in the week before, we decided to take the plunge and booked a site at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park. It was less than a week away, in the middle of the summer, so sites weren’t easy to come by. But, we got lucky and were able to find an electrical site for the night. It was the only electrical site available, so we jumped on it!

Of course, we had great intentions of getting to the campground at a reasonable time (ie: around happy hour), but prepping and hitching up took a little longer than we expected (it didn’t help that Chris came home from work a little later than expected as well!). We were only going overnight, so preparations weren’t that extensive. We cheated a little and stopped for take out sushi that we could have for dinner, once we arrived (it was actually a brilliant plan!) and picked up our favourite Kettleman’s Bagels and lox, for breakfast.

Murphy’s point is about 90 minutes from our house and the drive was easy and uneventful. Just before we arrived, we spotted two deer at the side of the road. We live right in the city and deer sightings are rare for us, so it was fun to spot them.

We arrived to our reserved site 56 only to realize that the plug in was, what seemed like, MILES away from Holly and that our regular plug was not going to be sufficient to reach it. Bummer. Luckily, we took Daisy for a walk up to the camp store and they were able to loan us an extension cord for the night. I think we got the last one. Phew. It was a regular extension cord, which meant we couldn’t run the A/C, but we could run our fantastic fan, which ended up to be just fine.

It turns out that Murphy’s Point PP was the PERFECT place for us to have our inaugural trip. Because we only had the site for one night and we arrived in the early evening, we decided that we would just keep Holly hitched up to the car. This made our departure the next day much faster and gave us time to enjoy the park in the morning. The bonus of this site was that it was a PULL THRU site! Which meant we could still practice our backing up skills outside the comfort of our own home, instead of in the presence of (most likely, well-seasoned) camping strangers. The only downside was that the picnic table and fire pit were on the wrong side of our trailer, so we had to go all the way around our car to get to them. Really not the end of the world, but just more complicated to bring food outside. And being our first trip, we still didn’t have any chairs, so if we wanted to sit outside, the picnic table was it.

One of the best things about this trip was that we ran into a few people we knew, who were just a few sites away. It was fun to catch up and introduce them to Holly (and Daisy!). We also met a couple with two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and had a few lovely conversations with them about dogs and camping. It’s so fun to meet other campers!

We had really beautiful weather during our stay and Daisy enjoyed walking around the campgrounds and getting her feet wet at the boat launch, where dogs are allowed to be. Sadly, dogs aren’t allowed at the beach, which is too bad (but we understand why), so we had to check it out from afar.

We ate lunch and quickly packed up so that we could leave by the 2 pm check out time. On our way out, we stopped for our first dump. It was easier than we expected and luckily we had no crazy mishaps, although, we realized that two sets of rubber gloves (one pair each) would work MUCH better than none. Oops. Rubber gloves were immediately added to the list, as was extra hand sanitizer to go in the “dumping supplies” bin.

We weren’t in any rush to get home, so we headed towards Perth for the afternoon. We thought we’d been to Perth many times, but I guess blowing through on Hwy 7 en-route to somewhere else doesn’t really count! Perth is a beautiful little place! We stopped in town and parked on a side street that would accommodate both our car and trailer - easy in and easy out! We walked over to Victoria Park and then stopped for a snack and drink at Coutts Coffee on Main Street. On our way out of Perth, we made one final stop at the Perth Brewing Co., where we enjoyed a flight of beer and brought home some of their Grapefruit Radlers.