What is more sublime than camping in the wilderness? That is exactly what the family got up to over the weekend and here is one of my patented straight up from the camp fire shots. Once I get the tent set up, we have a place to sleep and it is time for a well-earned beer, I pop a camping chair up by the fire. A nice breather, look to the heavens, and rejoice being set up to live a couple days in the nature.

Silent Lake

This is how the satellite saw me as I parked beside my camp fire. Plenty of little puddles/swamps and some of my favourite Kawartha area lakes. This one is completely inside a provincial park and is great for the beaches, clean water, and lack of motorized boats. Silent Lake https://www.ontarioparks.com/park/silentlake used to be a private fishing lake that became a provincial park in 1977. Small mouth bass minnows swimming between your feet everywhere.




The reason this perhaps our preferred place to camp is that the sites we get are 20 meters from the beach. Set up, grab a beer and a chair, walk through the trees and you are in the lake. Looking south, the weather was pretty much perfect at mostly sunny and 25 Celsius.

19 KM of walking trails and paths wandering between sides all over the park. I prefer this to sidewalks any day of the week.




It was also the maiden camping voyage for Daniel the Spaniel. So many damn chipmunks to chase around and he must have fetched 100 sticks from the lake when swimming like a waterdog. He still is a city dog as illustrated here where he chose the plastic tarp as a bed instead of some comfy moss.

He and the fish were not the only wild life there. We were visited by woodpeckers, and found this little fella peaking at us from under the rock. I searched several sites https://wanderingwagars.com/silent-lake-provincial-park/ to see if what the native snakes are and the best I came up with is the common water snake https://inaturalist.ca/taxa/29305-Nerodia-sipedon



I do enjoy the view from the camp fire late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. I look up at the camp, calculate what will have to be packed away before I sleep so that the racoons don't wreck everything. I did have visitors 2 nights in a row but I bounced a shotput sized rock right off one of those masked bandits. I heard them wrecking the neighbouring site the next night.




I played a bit with the exposure setting on my new phone camera too. Usually, they display well on the screen but come out as solid grey when you look at the actual picture. The new phone software seems to gauge the light/contrast, automatically kick on the exposure, and probably snaps a bunch of pictures to meld into the final one. I am just happy it picked up the light from the town an hour south and the 2 stars low in the southern sky.




Of course there is beer while camping! I love to visit the local beer stores on the off chance there are smaller breweries in the area I can discover all at once when 12 are in my cooler. I MAY just have a camping #BeerSaturday post in the chamber for this weekend.

Sublime Silent Lake

Sunday was not entirely as sublime as I am painting it as I did have a lot of packing up and driving to do. Still awesome to wake up in the woods, wander out to the quiet lake, and take a few breaths. Living in that moment, knowing they make up the basis for happiness, and thinking about people who are unable to enjoy peaceful moments beside a cool lake.

These are the moments that will warm me in the long winter and keep me appreciative I can not only experience it with my family, but I can share it here.

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Do you even camp bro?