Camping - FAIL!

My boyfriend and I were really excited to go camping this weekend.  I got someone to sub my fitness class, rescheduled my mani-pedi, and we had it all planned.  We would leave Friday after work, stay Friday and Saturday night, and head home on Sunday.

We both grew up in "camping" families, and he was in boy scouts and I was in girl guides, so we were more than prepared... or so we thought (more on that in a bit)

Here's our complete camping checklist for your downloading convenience! (clicking on the link will take you to google docs where you can download it as a PDF)

We packed up everything on that list - tetris-ed it into my Sentra and hit the road!

(gorilla pod hanging off the "holy s#!%" handle)

The one thing we didn't do was MAKE A RESERVATION.  We figured that because it was just your average weekend it wouldn't be necessary. We were wrong. (I found out later that that weekend was free park day or something like that, which would explain why they were all full!)

(this was taken with my gorilla pod on the trunk of my car - awesome!)

The spot we were planning on going to (146km away) was all booked!  We got the numbers for other regional parks not too far away to try to salvage our weekend.  The 2 closest were also full!  We called a 4th and they said they had lots of space.  We thought that was odd, but we headed off in that direction (73km from where we were).  On the way there, we decided to try call another place just to see, and they were full too.

We were pretty sure this place had to be a bust because it didn't make sense that they had lots of room and everywhere else was full.

We were right.  By this time, our trip was quickly turning into a joke.  And nothing was more true than when we got to our "destination"

Forrest - FAIL!!

Unfortunately you can't see it that well in this picture, but clearly not too long ago, Canwood Provincial forest had burned down.  lol  (yes, forrest fires aren't funny, but they are necessary in nature! but the idea of erecting a sign to highlight a burned forrest IS funny!)

This make the bear sad :(

We checked out the sites, and it was pretty dumpy (the golf course looked okay, but we're not really golfers!) and FULL of mosquitoes, and it also wasn't on a lake.

(we are not happy campers!)

So we packed ourselves back into the car and headed home.

We took a different route home because it was a better highway (223km later we returned home after making a big loop - 442km!)  

Not all was lost though!  We made the best of the weekend and completed a fairly big house project (while drinking our cooler full of beer!)  More on that later!!