Tripping

The value is in the journey, not the destination.

That's our mantra when we go into the woods, though it's probably worth remembering when embarking on other things as well.  When we do go into the woods, we prepare like crazy, and try to think through all the variations that could happen - planning wins the day, and all of what we bring has to be woods-tested and very light as after-all we have what we carry on our backs and no more.  I say "backs" but I mean our canoe in this case.  For anyone unfamiliar with the word "portage" it means you carry all that's in your boat, and your boat (on your head), so that makes weight a concern.

Our tripping took us to a park that we hadn't visited before - on the water. Killarney in Ontario where the typical outdoors experience is complemented by quartzite mountains.  This adds to the scenery certainly, and makes the trip worth the views alone.  It also means you are moving from lake to river to lake across mountains at times, and funny thing about mountains - they're uphill. (hence the weight concern)

The park is remote, but legendary enough that it draws people far and wide, so we did see plenty of others in the wilderness.  You'll have to understand my perspective on this when I say plenty - as we have been in the woods for a few days and never seen a soul.  Plenty means perhaps 4-5 other parties a day, and often on portages and campsites we pass by. It's not Christmas in the mall.

The tripping went well - we accomplished our pre-designated routing and saw what we wanted to see, but we planned poorly in one sense.  You see we didn't build in 'down-time' activities, as the last few trips we'd done were about the 'movement'.  Our schedule normally has worked like this: you break camp by 08:30 or so, having had breakfast, packed up, and cleaned the site so it's spotless for the next adventurers.  Then you go about your route for the day, stopping as you need a break, and for lunch, and often at the end of particularly arduous portages. (A few km's with a pack and canoe on your shoulders, up and down steep hills pushes you a little).  You arrive at the next night's campsite about 4-5pm and get set up, think about dinner, get a fire going and so on.  There's down time certainly, but we don't build in relaxing time as such.  We don't bring chairs, or books, or fishing gear - these just aren't those kinds of adventures for us.  Killarney as beautiful as it is is smaller than we were used to, and so we were completing our day's trip by lunch time.  While that certainly isn't bad, the truth is we hadn't planed for a set of half-days, and hence it wasn't attractive to us as an experience.

The first afternoon we ended up storing our boat in the woods on the lake we would sleep on, and packed up our load to the highest local mountains just after lunch. We aimed to do a 10km or so trail and got lost, so still probably covered some distance, but found our way back to the boat a little tired, chagrinned and more than aware that Teva's are great water sandals, and not so good for mountaineering.  Still we were at camp by 4pm.  The next day, we were on our camping lake by 11am.  So we pushed out of the park a day early.

In hindsight, we did what we aimed to do, though if I was going to do it again tomorrow, I'd pack differently, with more campsite (luxuries) that we could pass the time with.  I like relaxing as much as the next person.  I don't feel that we 'failed' in any way either, just that we'd planned poorly. That meant we couldn't enjoy the full potential of the journey we undertook.