Attaching the electrodes of knowledge to the nipples of ignorance.

As some of you know, I’ve had a pretty rough year thus far, so when August rolled around, I was completely ready for some time away from the real world; three blissful weeks in Algonquin park, followed by a bit of hiding out in Ottawa, and then a side trip to Toronto for a long weekend to attend our first real convention, FanExpo, which I’ll cover in a separate post.

First off, the photos from the trip are up on Flickr, but there is also a short video:

Once we arrived in Algonquin park and got our camping permits, we were made aware that (for the second year), there was a bear warning for our area, which isn’t a big deal – we keep a *very* clean campsite, so bears have never bothered us.

The first few days were good – my little sister and her daughter came up and stayed with us for a few days, which was an excellent opportunity to get to know Kiokiane better. I probably wasn’t the greatest host – I was sleeping twelve hours at a time, and spending a significant amount of my “waking” hours lying in a hammock, blowing through Tom Clancy books like a tornado through a deep-south trailer park – at a rate of four to five hundred pages per day.

After a few days of recharging my batteries, I finally managed to start interacting more seriously with Tracey, Jenn and Kiokiane. On one day, Kiokiane even helped me wash the canoe.

One night, Tracey woke me up because she could hear a bear going through someone’s open-topped trailer, opening the coolers and food (stupidly) stored there. Funny thing, bears – they are strong and can climb into things, even trailers with walls a few feet high. The bear came by the next night, visiting a site a little further away, and then pretty much didn’t cause any trouble for us. Clean site = no trouble (99.99% of the time).

This was followed up by my friend Mark and his family coming up, but they stayed on a different site (in the 400s!), but it worked out quite well; we all had dinner and a fire on our site one night, the second we went to theirs, and a pancake breakfast on our site the day they left. All round, a good time was had, and it was fun to get to know Mark’s family better.

The following week was chocked full with more relaxing and goofing off, interspersed with canoe trips and walks about the area. We also made a brief trip into Whitney, to pick up some fresh supplies. We also visited the Mad Musher restaurant, now smoke-free, had lunch, and took advantage of the free Wi-Fi.

The Perseids meteor shower made its annual appearance for some wonderful entertainment for a few nights, although they did have to compete with the rising near-full moon, and the glow of the milky way galaxy.

At the end of the week, Tracey’s nephews Matt and Warren came up for a couple of days, mostly doing what we’d been doing beforehand, hanging out, reading and relaxing.

More relaxing, paddling, walking and goofing followed.

Thursday night Gailene and Lindsay came up to visit amidst a bit of a rainstorm, which quite suddenly became quite exciting when the wind blew up, came close to knocking our dining tent down, but did lift one of the tarps off it’s poles, so I got rather wet. Fortunately, we were somewhat sheltered by trees between us and the lake. Others were not as fortunate – there were damaged tarps and tents around. Once we had settled back in, we could hear the sound of chainsaws in the distance – a sure sign of downed trees. Fortunately, no one was injured, but an outhouse was hit by a tree, a picnic table was smashed in half, and someone in the 200′s had their canoe damaged by a tree, that I suspect that they just abandoned. [CBC News]

Worth noting; the wind that hit us came from the west. The downed trees fell in the opposite direction, so we got rolled over by a rotating mass of air at least 300 metres wide.

The remainder of the trip was lovely and pretty uneventful – quiet walks, some paddling around, reading in hammocks, star gazing, the usual fun. After twenty two days in the park, we came back to Ottawa, unpacked, went to the Museum of Science and Technology, took in District 9 (an outstanding film), and then went off to FanExpo with our friends Greg and Sue, which was a fantastic time (more on that later, maybe).