First Of The Season - Part III

Rondeau Park - X marks the spot - where we camp

 

Day three started slowly and continued in that vein. Despite every day’s weather forecast being for thunderstorms and rain, it had been storm-free since we arrived. I do understand that such storms are incredibly local, where we can be dry and warm in Rondeau, but not ten kilometres away there could be a deluge. I suppose we’d been lucky thus far. Wednesday was cooler with quite a wind blowing up from the south-west, a wind that had brought all the wind and kite surfers out onto Rondeau Bay.

The day’s primary activity was to walk all the “loops”, the roads around the campground, and size up every potential camping spot, with a view to future camping expeditions. We’d come armed with a lovely, printed map, courtesy of Ontario Parks, and a set of Dollar Store highlighter pens that singularly refused to work properly on the map’s shiny paper. It didn’t daunt us, though, as we strode off in the sunshine. The sites within the Provincial Parks are not like those you get at commercial campgrounds in that they’re usually just a scrap of land carved out from the woods. They don’t have hard “pads” to park on, and are rarely flat, so choosing one requires an eye for what will work for us, plus some practical stuff like shade, traffic, and how far from the electrical pillar you’ll likely be. After surveying all ninety or so usable sites, we only had ten definites and seven maybes, which shows just how darned picky we can be. To be fair, most of the sites we rejected we did so because of the shade issue. Nice sites but likely a bit warm should the weather be like it has been on this trip. Still, it was good to wander around and see what was available.

On that note I should take the time to say, again, just how lucky we are to have this wonderful park so close to us. It’s on a spit of land that juts out into Lake Erie and is home to one of the last stands of Carolinian forest in North America. Because of its position and its indigenous flora and fauna, it’s a regular stopping off point for migratory birds, where they can feed and rest. It’s also home to a ton of plants, insects and animals, from Coyote to Turtle, Deer to Squirrel, and Raccoon to Chipmunk. Indeed, as I write this, there’s a Chipmunk three feet away from me searching for food at the edge of our camp mat. Delightful. Not so delightful is the army of biting bugs, but of course they’re bird and bat food so I’m reasonably happy to be part of the food chain. Ticks, and the accompanying Lyme Disease, are a problem here, but they are all over this part of the country, so we simply remain vigilant and enjoy the outdoors anyway.

We did chat about our trip next week, not an Airstream trip but a run over to Fremont in Michigan to meet up with some distant cousins of mine. I made the fatal error of looking at the family tree website before supper, just checking out the family connections to those cousins, and I ended up falling down another rabbit hole, updating new hints from Ancestry.com and creating fancy graphics to explain what “Fourth Cousin, Once Removed” looks like. The call of the wild, or rather supper, hauled me back out again and I put the computer down, which was a sensible move.

We sat out in the Pleasure Dome again while the darkness fell. The birdsong was a joy to listen to, and as DW pointed out, it stopped, mostly, almost all at once. There was still the honking of the geese to be heard, and last night we heard the elusive Whippoorwill, a bird that hunts insects at night and has a call, a repeated call, that really does sound like they’re saying “whippoorwill” over and over again. That was a first for us. As we sat, we watched the flashes of lightning out over the lake but heard no thunder. The weather app’s radar function showed a long band of thunderstorms heading up from the south west, but a good distance to the south of us, pretty much over Cleveland on the lake’s south shore. Lucky Cleveland.

Day four will be packing up day, as three nights is all our waste tanks can stand. I don’t have the inclination to drag the Airstream over to the dump station and bring it back, nor do I want a “Blue Boy”, a plastic tank on wheels that you can decant your onboard waste into and walk it over to the dump station. I have no idea how you’d keep one of those things clean, really, so unless we have an onsite sewer connection, three nights is our maximum stay. Until then, we’re looking forward to another early night, and relishing the relatively cool evening.