The following is a transcript from our podcast episode on Fun Activities To Do Outside the Provincial Parks While Camping.
Pamela:
Hello and Good day, eh? Welcome to the Super Good Camping podcast. My name is Pamela.
Tim:
I’m Tim
Pamela:
and we are from supergoodcamping.com. We’re here because we’re on a mission to inspire other families to enjoy camping adventures such as we have with our kids.
Fun Things to Do When You’re Camping
Pamela:
Today, we wanted to talk a little bit about things that you can do outside the park where you’re camping that would be fun and that we’ve done with our kids.
Tim:
When we say outside the park, that generally applies to car camping as opposed to backcountry camping because as we all know I have backcountry camping problems
Pamela:
There’s not much outside the park in the backcountry.
Tim:
There is not. It’s a bit of a hike to the corner store. So right out of the gate, the first thing I would say is to spend some time doing you know, Google. I belong to 8000’ish, Facebook groups that are about camping. Check them. Look for other people’s park reviews and stuff, they tend to have lots of great ideas in there. Google on its own. TripAdvisor is another great site. And then when you get to the park, almost guaranteed the park paper will have all the good places to go to locally, not necessarily the little hidden gems, but lots of really good ones. They tend to be like that. So those are great resources. And then, you know, I would say we could share some of ours that we’ve done over maybe the last 10 years, some of the places we’ve gone to have fun. I’m going to turn it back over to Pamela and she’s going to talk about Killarney.
Pamela:
So Killarney, apparently, has a place that sells the World’s Best fish and chips. Having sampled it, we feel like maybe that was a little over-advertising.
Tim:
It was good. I don’t know that I would say it was the best but it was definitely good. And I can speak for having read at least three other people including the guy that owns Killarney Outfitters mentioning that they’re fresh-caught fish. They actually catch the fish in a river that runs somewhere in that neck of the woods and that’s what they serve. That’s good stuff. So I will give them that for sure.
Pamela:
As a surprising coincidence, we actually ran into one of the kids that Brandon went to school with while we were there. And then the other place is Killarney Outfitters which Tim was quite enamored with and bought a few things while we were there.
Tim:
It’s a bucket-list thing, really any outfitter is a bucket-list place for me, I don’t care. They could have like three things in the shop and I want to go. But Killarney Outfitters I had heard about numerous times and I had never been to. Thomas and I had actually done a backcountry thing in Killarney the same year months earlier, and we simply couldn’t make it work. We didn’t have the time to go to Killarney Outfitters because they’re not actually in the park. They’re a little farther beyond the park when you come in from the highway. I bought shirts. I bought fuel. I bought little bottles for sauces and condiments. Yeah, I got stickers. I got free stickers, which are stuck on the canoe now.
Pamela:
And he actually went back the following year and bought a canoe from them.
Tim:
I bought the canoe in the fall and then I had to go pick it up in the spring and then come back to Algonquin Park to paddle it. That was a whacked-up thing, though.
Pamela:
We went to Bon Echo. Which is the closest town? [Cloyne, Ontario]
Tim:
Ottawa. It’s north and a little bit west of Ottawa, something like that.
Pamela:
Brandon and I, because we were getting eaten alive in our campsite, went to the Bonne Chere caves, which is not too far away, but it was pretty cool. It’s kind of a guided tour down through the caves. It’s not like you just go and do your own spelunking thing but it was pretty interesting.
The MAZ was one of our favourite local shops which has ice cream and they’ve got souvenirs and they’ve got camping gear.
Tim:
Yeah, they have a whole whack of stuff considering was it pandemic time now? No, it was probably right before it but they had a whack of, I don’t remember canoes so much, as stand-up paddleboards, kayaks that sort of jazz at the front. Yeah and looking not like hardcore guy stuff, but mostly user-friendly type of stuff. So I thought that was pretty cool. Go ahead.
Pamela:
Turkey Point, that’s where we went last summer, they have really cool, very extensive mountain biking trails all around Turkey Point.
Tim:
Yeah. And so just to put it out there, some of the trails go through the park. It’s a community thing so there are lots of trails that are outside the park that also tie into the ones inside the park. It sounds like it was totally promoted by the Ontario parks. In their newspaper, they had a whole mapping system for it. It’s very cool. It’s big. It’s bigger than the park so everybody uses it. It just sounds great. I didn’t do any of it, I sat last year.
Pamela:
Nearby is Port Dover which is a nice little town and not such a nice little town if you happen to be there on a Friday the 13th.
Tim:
It becomes busy, so it has some issues. I’m sure I did a rant about Sibbald Point at some point. It’s not that I have anything against bikers by any stretch. I have my bike license, right? Many motorcycles. I’ve done the Port Dover run, it’s insane. It takes over literally everything. It’s a great boon for local businesses. It’s just that they’re everywhere. As with anything, there are good people and there are not-so-good people and it’s just too much, certainly for the state of mind that you’re in when we were there. We’re trying to be chillin’ camping and stuff. And they were just everywhere. They were often ahh, it was just a bit much.
Pamela:
So if you’re not aware every Friday the 13th bikers converge on Port Dover and it’s a fundraising thing.
Tim:
Yeah, they do wonderful things! They do support all kinds of wonderful charities, whether it’s for kids or diseases, sight-challenged people, or whatever. They do so much good. It was just insane the number of bikes and it was very much a massive juxtaposition with the mind space that we were in trying to have a chill vacation.
Pamela:
We were actually heading home on Friday the 13th and they were driving the other way. So it was interesting just to see how many bikes were going in the opposite direction toward Port Dover.
Tim:
Many, many, many, many motorcycles. Unbelievable.
Pamela:
Yeah, it’s crazy. Presqu’ile is our most recent camping trip. We actually went just a couple of weeks ago. And that was when the park newspaper was really great because it had a whole page of all kinds of local things you could do. Each of the boys picked out something from the park newspaper that they wanted to do. One of them was mini golf at the Big Apple which is a big apple. It’s a touristy kind of place just off the highway and literally, you can see a giant apple and they have all kinds of apple-related products, apple bread, apple pie, apple butter, and apple everything. People come out with bags full of apple products. We just went, checked it out, we played mini-golf, and saw the petting zoo. The other big kid chose Brighton Speedway. He’s really into cars and so we went to Brighton Speedway on Saturday night and just watched the car races which was actually pretty fun although we all smelled a lot like exhaust afterward.
Tim:
I stayed on the campsite and read, hanging out with Farley our puppy dog. They came back smelling like they were standing in a parking lot with cars gunning their exhaust.
Pamela:
And we’re all covered in dust because we happened to be right in the front row, right at the turn and so because as the cars came around the turn all the dust blew up right at us.
Tim:
They were all grinning with grit in their teeth. It sounds like it was a fun time.
Pamela:
Inverhuron Provincial Park is near Grand Bend. My recollections of Grand Bend are related to a couple of places. There was sort of a surf shop type of thing where you could get bathing suits and you could get stand-up paddle boards, you can get anything related to water sports. Then the other one was this little souvenir/gift shop/gourmet food place.
Tim:
Yeah, honestly I know we went into town. This is quite a few years ago, probably about eight-ish years ago because it was when we did the great, big Frank family [Pamela’s family] dinners. We did a couple of them. We did a Mexican food night and then we did a night with ribs where we threw lobster tails in the fire, so a very decadent week. It was great. Honestly, I don’t remember that much about the town. I know that they had a massive place to buy wood from outside the park as Ontario Park wood if you haven’t heard me say it before…
Pamela:
is wet!
Tim:
It helps keep the mosquitoes down with all the smoke, so there you go. But yeah, they had a great place it was not very far.
Pamela:
Oh, and the Bruce Peninsula is nearby. If you wanted to check out the Bruce Power Station or you wanted to go to Tobermory that’s not too far.
Tim:
MacGregor Point is not that far either. It’s cool. And just on the note of Inverhuron, they have a sidewalk kind of thing for biking and but it’s massive, it’s really long and it ties into the park biking trails, which the park has tonnes of, just so you know. It was very cool to just sort of roll out of that and be halfway between the park and town before I went, “Oh, where the heck am I?” It was cool. There you go
Pamela:
and Killbear Provincial Park, which on our smart screen in our kitchen came up just before we came in here to record, there was a picture from Parry Sound, and our first dog, Cookie was with us on that trip, and the boys were in the back of an old fire truck with her that was parked in the fire hall there. We did a trip to the fire hall and the kids really enjoyed being able to go through the whole place and go and climb into the different vehicles.
One of the things we sometimes will also do while camping, is if we’re sick of eating what we planned on the menu and we feel like a change, we go into town and go to a restaurant. We also did that when we were in Parry Sound.
We have pictures of the kids posing with a bear statue outside the restaurant pretending to be scared.
Tim:
It’s fun. It’s always nice to see pictures from camping. I love our smart screen because you get to see them back when you liked them.
Pamela:
I’m smacking him!
Tim:
Yeah, she’s smacking me and she’s gonna edit that out [oops, looks like I didn’t!]. You’re spending a bunch of money to go out and live like a hobo in the woods, it never hurts to throw a couple of extra bucks at the local economy. Go pop in, check out the farmers market, or whatever. Obviously, we talk about camping, pretty much everything is about camping but we do go occasionally up to a cottage that my parents rent. And one of the fun things I like to do is go to the local farmer’s market. They do it on Wednesday or Thursday or something like that in Gravenhurst. And you get to go around looking at some artwork, you get some locally made honey, wood carving, and baked goods. Baked goods are great, but fresh corn, like right out of a field, that was picked the day before yesterday. That’s awesome stuff and you’re pumping money back into that economy. Much as it’s only a few shekels here and there, it’s a good move for every bit of society, right? Everybody needs to make a living, and if we’ve got a couple of extra bucks here, then why not put it locally? We’re gonna get good food, better grown, not stuff that’s been shipped from Argentina.
Pamela:
That’s it for us for today. Thank you so much for listening. Please do reach out to us. Our email address is hi@supergoodcamping.com. We are on all of the social media. We would love to talk to you there too. And otherwise, we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye!
Tim:
Bye.