Our Driveway

June/July 2019

If you live in Eastern Ontario, you’ll know that the actual camping season is not especially long. However, like many other places, the planning season can be quite long!

I remember when I was growing up, my parents almost never booked campsites. We just arrived, drove around to see which sites were empty and then picked the best one. Most campgrounds were first come, first served and they were almost never completely full. Our family drove across Canada employing this method of camping, a few times. Fast forward to the present, where 2019 is the last year that the Ontario Provincial Parks will save a small portion of sites as first come, first served - in 2020 ALL sites will be able to be reserved online, in advance.

Taking this into consideration as well as the fact that camping has become very popular, we’re thinking about our spring and summer camping in January, where it’s -40 degrees celcius and the snow banks are more than a few feet high!

A super popular place to camp in Ontario is in Algonquin Park. We’ve only gone through the park on the highway and I wanted to change that. I looked to see which campground I wanted to stay at and which sites were really great. I marked my calendar and set my alarm. Despite pressing that reserve button at 7:00 am on the nose, I still could not secure the site I had hoped for! In all fairness, it was for the July 1st, Canada Day weekend, so I knew I might have some trouble. Instead, I found another site at a different campground and booked it for the long weekend, excited that we would finally get a chance to camp in a place that everyone says is a gem in Ontario.

About 2 weeks before our Canada Day trip… we had just left our driveway to meet friends for dinner and I could hear an odd noise. I looked up and saw that the sunroof on our one year old car had shattered, but was still intact! We turned around and switched cars. The next day, I took the car to our dealership, and they said the glass to replace the sunroof would need to be ordered from Germany! And it was likely going to take a number of weeks before it was ready. Yikes.

As we got closer to our Algonquin Park camping reservations, the car still wasn’t ready and there was no clear timeline for completion. Three days before our reservation, I posted on an Airstream facebook group that I had reservations that I couldn’t use and wondered if anyone wanted to take them. Even though it was July, all of Ontario had experienced quite a bit of flooding in the spring and water levels were still high. A family that had reservations elsewhere had just heard that their site was still flooded, so we connected and I transferred the site to them.

Literally an hour after I transferred the site (the day before our reservation), I received a call from the dealership telling me our car was ready! Murphy’s Law. It worked out well for us to be at home that weekend so not all was lost. I was just happy that someone else was able to enjoy the site and save their holidays from cancellation:)

Instead, we looked ahead and booked a site at Wilmington Notch State Park near Lake Placid for a few weeks later…

Towing: 0 kms

Driving: 0 kms