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| Emily Marsh on Pigeon Lake |
Another scorcher beckoned as I sat outside at 7am, quietly beginning to boil. This was the last day of our trip so I decided to hop into the car and get some photographs of Emily Provincial Park before Mrs T surfaced. Why the car? Well, the temperature was already above 25C at 8am and I had no intention of sweating around the place when I had a nice, cool car to do the leg work. One of the photographs is shown above; a very agreeable Park, I think. That said, I'll still be dropping them a line about the tired old shower blocks!
We seem to have hitching up pretty much sorted and we can be done and out of a site in half-an-hour these days, albeit when we have no tadpoles or hound to hinder our progress. I watched a couple packing up their site the day before and they took well in excess of two hours to complete the process, but they were not travelling light like we do.
I'd been a little concerned that I was going to struggle to get our 28' long caravan off this particular site, especially if we had someone camped opposite as I felt I needed a bit of room to negotiate the tight turn required. As it happened, the site opposite was free when we were leaving and even then it wasn't as tight a turn as I'd thought so we accomplished it easily; you live and learn, I suppose. The Park's dump station was something else, though. Dump stations normally consist of concrete basin at the side of the road, depressed a bit like a shallow sink and with a covered hole in the centre; a bit like a crude French footprint toilet but with a brass lid on the hole. You connect up your "slinky", a wide, flexible hose, to the trailer's waste tank outlets, poke the other end of the pipe into the hole in concrete, using the lid to hold it in place and then open the trailer's tank valves, black first (that's the poo) and then grey (that's the shower and sink). Well, this dump station was, as the dear Mrs T would say, "minging". It smelled bad (they don't usually, surprisingly), the concrete basin was old and pitted and clearly in need of a good hose down, and the place was crawling with flies. When I opened the lid over the hole there was an evil smelling scum visible, again not normal, but I had to press ahead anyway. Like the showers, this one old and tired dump station for the number of camp sites in the park was just not sufficient and it showed after the busy weekend. I was very, very pleased to get out of there, but not before hosing down my feet!
Back on the road, we decided to do a bit of old style navigation and use a map. We weren't so far from Toronto so most roads go north to south, but we wanted to avoid the big city and go east to west. I have no doubt that the SatNav would have found us a suitable route, although of late it had been finding us routes that would perhaps have been better without the Airstream in tow, but it only ever lets you view an area of map about 500 metres square and we wanted a bigger view. A little bit of preparation time and we had a good, if slightly out of the way, route planned and how pleased we were that we took it. It was up and down some quite steep hills, but the Toadmobile and its 7,000lb load eat them all up, and with some style. The gas consumption looks scary as you go up, and the speed drops off of course, but it's all made up for as you coast down the other side (a tad too fast at times!). We saw a bit of rural Ontario that we didn't know and even with one small navigation error, we made good time and were back on the 407 ETR Toll Road in no time at all. The ETR takes you north of Toronto and avoids the hideously overcrowded 401 highway through the more urban areas of the big city. We'll get the toll charge bill later, but it was worth whatever it cost as we cruised through without a pause.
The ETR joins up with the 401 west of Toronto (and the airport, thank goodness) and then it was a straight run home. We were driving into a fairly steady headwind which was knocking the gas mileage a bit, but in the 33C heat, the engine water temperature hit 100C at one point, about 15C above normal. Still, it soon settles when you're not pushing, coming down a hill for example, and that 100C is well within acceptable limits.
We did decide to stop off at our Airstream dealership in London, specifically to pick up RV toilet paper (expensive but essential when it has to go into that holding tank) and a couple of other bits. We came away with a rather spiffy 12v LED light "bulb" to go in the trailer's fridge; it was $22 but is really sexy and a different class to the yellow tinged thing that is standard. We also saw a really nice Ford Taurus SHO sedan hitched up to a 30' Airstream; a lovely combination, a photograph of which I will tease all my pick-up loving friends on the Airstream Forum.
So we arrived home to big heavy clouds, thunder and few spots of rain, but it was still 30C at 8pm. Over the six nights and seven days, we'd towed just a little over 900 kms, which isn't that far, really. We'd had rain once, during our first night, and had the awnings (all of 'em!) deployed for most of that time. Sure we missed the Tadpoles and the hound (a bit) but it was great to be unencumbered for a week.
Our next trip is a local hop to Rondeau next week for some socialising, then in August we hit the road for the Boston/Quebec/Thousand Island adventure; stay tuned, toad fans.
