Airstream Road Trip to Selkirk 2025 - Full Day the Second

 

Goodness, what a chilly night. I roused myself at around seven, stepped outside to go to the shower block and thought I'd been transported to the far north in the night. The official temperature was 8C, not desperate, but it had been 22C the day before, so quite the difference. It was the north-west wind that was the culprit.

Shower done, and vents open in the trailer to disperse some of the condensation on the cold windows, I sat down at the Chromebook to jot down the previous day's doings. I didn't feel much like sitting outside, so I huddled indoors and pondered why I was being such a wimp. I could blame the previously sweltering heat and the sudden change, but really it was just me.

When we're camping, we're quite lucky to generally have good Internet access. We don't have twenty-foot poles with antennae atop, nor even a high gain aerial on the roof of the Airstream, we just use our cell phones and the WiFi Hotspot function, or in my case the USB tethering, to get access through our laptops. Our family cell phone plan is very generous with its data allowance, too, which helps. Airstreams are not great places for radio reception, given that they're made of two layers of reflective metal and have fine mesh metal fly screens over all the windows. FM radio, and even WiFi from your home network, simply won't penetrate it, but cell phone signals will. We can sit inside and get good cell phone reception, and therefore good Internet access, always assuming that we're in an area that has a good cell service in the first place. Rondeau Park, the campground end at least, has good reception, as does Selkirk Park, so we're quite happy. Yes, I could get one of those poles to make sure the cell signal was perfect, but you still have to get the signal inside the trailer and into a router, and that's way too much effort when you can rely on your handset to do the donkey work. I know, there are people that say you should go off-grid when you camp and keep off the Internet, but it's those same people that watch TV and have their air-conditioner going the whole time when they're camping. I'd rather be able to read the news and blog up a storm than watch TV. Talking of TVs, there is a fifth-wheel trailer here that has a TV fixed to its outside wall so it can be watched outside. I hadn't seen one in Canada before, although I had seen plenty in the US. Bad habits, folks, bad habits.

This was the day we needed to go off site to get some petrol for the Toadmobile. We opted to go to the little town of Cayuga, about fifteen kilometres away, where there was a Pioneer gas station, my preferred brand because I can collect all manner of points and prizes with that brand, and they're generally the cheapest. The nearest other brand, Esso, was about the same distance but in another town. Gas stations are few and far between outside of towns in south west Ontario, and I don't recall seeing a single gas station along the route we took to drive here. Obviously had we needed petrol we could have diverted to a town, but on these lesser roads, gas stations are a thing of the past, which given the prevalence of the automobile seems a wee bit ironic.

Anyway, we stopped in Cayuga for a quick walk along the bank of the Grand River. There was a little paved walkway with some adjacent parking, but it only extended about four hundred metres. We gamely carried on along the road when the path ended, just to get some steps in, and admired the extended trailer park along the river bank, home to what looked like the entire hoarding population of Ontario. I don't mean to be nasty about trailer folk or hoarders, but the two things seem to go together. Gas was bought, I clunked the hitch receiver on the steep ramp getting out of the gas station and bent one of the sticky-out bits on the hitch-slop stopper (hitch clamp would be a better term), so it'll be interesting to see how easy it'll come off when that time arrives. The Toadmobile is low and will clunk the receiver on steep ramps even when the hitch head isn't installed, but this day it was installed, as was the clamp and yes, I clunked it.

Rather than head back to the Park, DW suggested that we motor over to Port Dover which, as the name suggests, is a little port on the lake, just where the Lynn River meets it. We were after a lighthouse-shaped souvenir for the grand-baby, knowing his love of lighthouses, and a port seemed a good place to find one. 

Port Dover is a fine little place, has a small harbour filled with commercial fishing vessels, and a nice sandy beach. It also has a dying Main Street, so like everywhere else in Ontario, and the usual array of fried-food emporia and gift shops that any little lakeside town would have. I say lakeside because it's right on Lake Erie, but it looked so like a little English seaside town that I was getting confused with all the "Lake Life" tat on sale in the shops, wondering why lake life when we were beside the sea. Of course Lake Erie is not the sea, but for an Englishman who grew up with the sea, it's hard to shake the idea that a massive body of water isn't the sea. It still gets me.

Anyway, we strolled by the river, walked by the beach (which was busy but emptying because a fresh south-westerly wind had sprung up and brought dark clouds), went into the tat shops, had an ice cream and also some fries, all those things you have to have when at the seaside, sorry, lakeside. We visited a bakery that had lots of vegan goodies for DW, and spoke to a man who worked there, or maybe owned it, who was from Mossley, near Manchester. We had a fine old chat about Saddleworth Moor, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and left the shop feeling quite depressed.

Port Dover is also the spiritual home of Ontario's motorcyclists. They have a gathering there every Friday 13th (I assume only when it falls outside the winter), and many of the shops there cater specifically for that event. These are not generally your Hell's Angel types, because the vast majority of bikers in these parts are oldiewonks like me. Bikes, Harleys being the favoured brand, are expensive, as is the insurance, and only old folks can afford them. However, there is a big bike community, and Port Dover is where they gather. Even though it wasn't Friday 13th, there were a few bikes about, and two caught my eye, ridden by a couple as far as I could tell. One was an original 1960s Triumph Bonneville, a noisy and oil-spewing 650 twin cylinder British bike, the other was a Yamaha 200cc, two-stroke twin cylinder, old enough to have drum brakes front and rear. It looked to be in good nick, too, so I guess the owners were real enthusiasts, although quite what the Hog owners would make of the Yammie oil-burner I don't know.

It was a lovely afternoon, despite the keen wind, and made all the better for being a spur of the moment thing. Port Dover might be a wee bit too far for a day trip for Charlie, but if we're in the area and staying, it'd be a great place for him.

When we returned to the Park, we sat out in the Pleasure Dome and had a wee drinkie-poo. It was warm and not windy where we were sitting. We spoke to a pair of fellow campers about the Pleasure Dome, about the trailer and of course, about the van that tows it. It's interesting to note that people in Canada raise their eyebrows and ask questions about how the van tows, but when we have been in the US, they just tell you outright that the van can't tow the Airstream, despite the fact that it's right there in front of them. Different cultures, and never the fifty-first State.

The weather forecast for our final full day isn't great, but the forecasts are not always accurate. We shall see what transpires. With a bit of luck, it'll be a wonderful day of doing not very much again.

Airstream Road Trip to Selkirk 2025 - The First Full Day

 

As I'd said in the previous post, it was an early night for me. Snuggled down under the duvet I went out like a light, although two beers had me up again in the wee small hours, but then I slept until six. Normally I would start moving at that point, but I just went deeper under the duvet and slept through until a quarter to nine, which is something I haven't done in a long while. Clearly the cool air of Selkirk Provincial Park is good for aiding restful sleep.

The first order of the day was to shower, which meant a walk through the campground to the Comfort Station. There's only one Comfort Station in this park, and you'd expect to have to wait for a stall but no, all but one was unoccupied and the cleaning team had been in and the whole place, changing area and all, was wet. While that meant drying off the clothes' pegs before hanging my clean stuff up, it also meant it was clean, which was nice.

The shower system itself was old fashioned but it worked. Lots of hot water, albeit discharging from the shower head at quite a leisurely pace. A hot shower is what sets me up for a hard day's camping.

It had been a cool night and the air was still warming as I sat outside with my coffee. The kids in the neighbouring sites were up and about of course, but that's what excitable kids do, and they seemed to be having a great time; I'm not sure the adults were enjoying it as much, though. 

I spent the morning working on the Chromebook and enjoying the warming sun. I did deploy the Airstream's awning because looking at the Chromebook's screen was getting a bit difficult in the bright sunshine. That was about the extent of the morning's activities. Breakfast didn't happen, so I went straight to lunch, prepared entirely by Dear Wife, which was lovely.

In the afternoon we ambled down to the lake, noting that the campground was fairly full and people looked quite happy to be sat outside their trailers or their tents just enjoying the fine weather. The day use area of the park is a large grassy field with barbecues and benches, kids' play equipment and even a volleyball net, which looked quite serviceable to me, someone who hasn't played volleyball in many a year.

Lake Erie, the yellow blob is Selkirk Provincial Park

The lake was flat calm, albeit that there were heavy clouds, including a funnel cloud, and rain far out across the water. While only the fourth biggest of the five Great Lakes, Erie is still 241 miles (388 Kilometres) long, and 57 miles (92 kilometres) wide. It has a surface area of 9,990 square miles (25,874 square kilometres). When you're stood on the north shore, you can't see the south shore, although sometimes you can see the steam from the power stations in Cleveland, Ohio, rising up over the horizon. It's an inland sea, and the weather can be quite different out on the lake to that on the shore, as was the case this afternoon. Funnel clouds out on the lake don't have quite the impact that they do on land, unless you're in a small boat of course, but we snapped some photos anyway, just to show how brave we were.

The lake looked a little low, with a flat limestone shelf exposed which allowed us to walk out to the water's edge and take a look. The water wasn't deep and, given that it's late August, was quite likely fairly warm. There was no one out swimming, though, and I wasn't going to start a trend, even though out there away from the beach the water was crystal clear.

The area that Selkirk Park now occupies was once the domain of the Anishinaabe and Salteaux people, before European contact. I don't do it enough, but we should always make land acknowledgements when we visit and enjoy places in modern Canada. We're not far from the Grand River, and the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy First Nations Reserve, the biggest reserve of its type in Ontario. The six nations comprise the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and Tuscarora people, and the reserve is home to some Lenape as well. A few years ago, we went to a Pow Wow on the Six Nations, and jolly nice it was, too.

I did check on the history of the park itself but couldn't find much of any value, other than the area the park occupies wouldn't make great farmland. Then I found the following paragraph in an Ontario Government paper about the Park's management plan:

"Selkirk Provincial Park commenced operation as a Provincial Park in 1969, primarily to provide recreational opportunities for the anticipated influx of people into the Haldimand-Norfolk Region. However, the increase in local population has not materialized as employment opportunities at the Nanticoke Industrial Complex failed to reach forecasted levels."

That would go some way to explaining why the park doesn't get as busy as some of the other parks in Ontario. Gubmint, eh?

Our evening was spent lounging around, inside the trailer mostly, and just chilling out. I started to watch a film on the Chromebook but couldn't maintain interest in it so I went to bed. That all sounds dull and boring but, when you consider that we've had Charlie on the go this past three months at home, the peace and quiet is something we both appreciate. Being a grandparent is fun, but us oldies really need the break sometimes. 

We're going to have to go off site tomorrow to get some petrol; it's much easier to fill the car up when you don't have a thirty-feet long trailer attached. Maybe we'll explore a little, maybe not. 

Watch this space for more battery-charging adventures.

Airstream Road Trip to Selkirk 2025 - On the Way

 

We don't usually camp in the school holidays. Camp sites can be hard to come by, and for many families it's the only chance they get to take the kids away, so we don't take places that would be better used. But when we were planning earlier in the year, I thought about Selkirk Provincial Park, a small and surprisingly unpopular camping park on the northern shore of Lake Erie. Ten minutes on the Ontario Parks website and I had divined that I could get a site, the same site we'd been to twice before, for four nights before the Labour Day weekend. There were plenty of other spaces available, too, which meant we weren't doing some family out of a trip, so I pressed the go button.

Quite why Selkirk is not much favoured is a bit of a mystery because it's really nice. There's a little beach, picnic areas, and an inlet off the lake that's good for kids to learn to enjoy the water. Certainly there are no long trails, or even too many diversions in the area, but it's pretty and quiet, and just the place for a peaceful break.

Our travel preparations were knocked a little off kilter with some last minute running around for the grand-baby. But Towed Haul was clean and ready to be filled with supplies on the Monday of our departure, so we spent the morning loading up. The summer's been very warm, but our travelling day was set to be around 20C, part cloud, part sun, and no threat of rain, so looking quite good. Selkirk is about a three hour drive from home, longer than we've done in a while, so I made sure there was some fresh water in the tank in order that we could use the onboard facilities if we had to.

Selkirk is also on the old Highway Three, a route that follows the shore of the lake all the way from the St, Claire River in the west, to the Niagara River in the east. We joined it at Blenheim, just about twenty minutes from home, and apart from dipping south of St Thomas, we stayed on "Number Three" for most of the run. It's not one continuous straight road, though, as there are the habitual right-angle turns every know and again as the road skirts the original land grants, and crosses north-south roads that have become more important over the years. There are arrow-straight sections of course, but there are also some nice "dips and swoops", and some challenging bends for us trailer towing people. There are also quite a few little settlements to pass through, which brings the speed down, and breaks up the field after field vista of soya beans and corn. It's actually a really pleasant drive, with or without the two and a half tons of metal behind us, and makes a change from the flat, straight roads of Chatham-Kent.

As we progressed and made our way into Norfolk County, the crops in the field changed markedly, apparently because the well-drained sandy loam of that county supports other things. Tobacco is one of the major cash crops, a paler variety than in Kent County, and dried in small sheds rather than the smoke barns that cure the darker tobacco grown in our part of the Province. There's a lot of asparagus (sandy loam again), and ginseng, a more recent introduction the area. Ginseng is grown in the shade, so there are fields filled with dark netting on metal frames with the rows of plants laid out below. I'm not sure what the market is for ginseng, but the farmers of Norfolk County seem to be able to make a profit on it.

As we approached the park, we skirted north of Nanticoke, a curious hive of industrial activity in the agricultural landscape. Nanticoke fronts Lake Erie and is home to a huge Stelco steel mill and an Ontario Power electricity generation station. I guess that steel milling supplies are brought in and out of the plant using the lake and the mass of freighters that ply the Great Lakes Waterway, which makes sense. The power station is powered by natural gas these days, but I'd bet that it was once coal, which would also have been transported on the water. Selkirk Park is just ten kilometres east of Nanticoke, but once in the park you'd never know it existed.

We arrived after about three hours and ten minutes driving, and I went into the little park office and shop to register. I'd already checked in online so it was just a case of confirmation. I was expecting some paper park's permits but no, apparently it's all paper-free at Selkirk these days. I haven't seen any Park's staff wandering around, but I'd imagine that they do a random check on camp site occupation. I'm all for it, but I hope people don't abuse the system.

Having dumped the holding tanks of the water I'd used in cleaning the camper, we found our site, a pull-through, and spent an age deciding where to park the Airstream. It made sense to put the "street side" of the camper to the power and water outlets, and that left a big usable space in front. Then we had a debate about whether the trailer was level, from side to side, and decided it wasn't. We deployed our "Lego Blocks", little plastic blocks that you can put under the wheels, and backed onto them. Still more debate ensued and we decided all was well, but only when we had unhitched from the Toadmobile did we decide that we'd over-done the levelling and Towed Haul was still on a slant. Too late, though, I wasn't going to hitch up again. I was going to be the first to fall out of bed as a result of any level issues.

We did notice, in among the Hop trees, a super-sized wasp's nest that was still clearly in use. With our newfound understanding of the insects that live around Ontario's native trees and plants, we didn't exclaim even the tiniest of shrieks of alarm. It was good to know that the nest was there, but if we don't bother the wasps, I doubt that they'll bother us.

The campground was fairly busy, a few empty sites but not many. There were lots of families, too, which is always good to see. The kids all seemed to be enjoying their camping, judging by the noise, but there's something quite comfortable about the sound of children enjoying themselves, or at least there is when there's a bit of distance between us and them!

We pitched our bug tent, the Pleasure Dome, and after dinner sat out in it until we both felt the cool air was too much. All our recent camping trips have been in the blazing heat of the early summer, so it was quite a turn up for us to start feeling cold. As the night time temperatures were set to dip to 12C, we broke out the duvet as well. 

It was only about 10pm when I gave up the unequal struggle and went to bed. A couple of beers certainly hastened my move to the bed, but I was feeling a bit pooped after the drive. 

We have three full days ahead of us at Selkirk and plan to do very little. Let's hope we achieve that lofty aim.

As a postscript to this entry, I should mention that this travel day was, coincidentally, our sixteenth wedding anniversary, so congratulations to us.

The sites at Selkirk are mostly pull-throughs, and are universally grassy. Unfortunately, on site 114 someone had obviously been camped for a while (two-week maximum) and there was a big, patio mat-shaped square that was completely devoid of grass. Those reprobates had clearly never been in the Scouts and learned that you take up or move your mat every couple of days. Still, we covered the area with our patio mat and it looked a wee bit better.