The following is the transcript from our episode that was recorded in July 2021 live from Presqu’ile Provincial Park. If you would prefer to listen to the episode, we apologize for the sound quality, the birds insisted on chatting while we were recording. You can listen here.
Pamela: Hello and good day, eh? and welcome to the Super Good Camping Podcast. My name is Pamela.
Brandon: I’m Brandon
Thomas: I’m Thomas.
Tim: I’m still Tim.
Pamela: And we’re here from supergoodcamping.com. We’re on a mission to inspire other families to enjoy camping adventures such as we have with our kids. We’re coming to you live today from Presqu’ile Provincial Park, near Brighton, Ontario. And we’re on the first of four camping trips this year for some of us. I’ll turn it over to Tim. He’s just going to talk a little bit about what we’ve been doing at Presqu’ile.
Tim: I started off with “um” because you can’t edit this and can’t take out all of my million “ums”
Pamela: You gotta get all of the “ums”, “ahh’s” and the “you knows” in.
Tim: We thought this would be a neat thing to try. Because we do edit the crap out of all the other episodes. I say bad words. And I say “um” a lot. Presqu’ile has been fabulous. We got a tonne of rain last night. What’s a camping trip without rain as the wonderful people [Alex and Jess] from Tents and Timber say,
Pamela: If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.
Thomas: Or it gives you pneumonia or…
Tim: Minor details! We’re right off the 401 in the grand scheme of things. It’s not quite that close. Thankfully, we can’t hear it.
Thomas: But we’re hearing trains.
Tim: Yes.
Pamela: Several of the provincial parks seem to have train tracks close by.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s not the first one.
Tim: It’s not.
Brandon: Bronte Creek also has a train track nearby.
Thomas: It definitely has a train near it.
Tim: Presqu’ile is a very nice park. I’ve been reading some posts on Facebook where people have been saying “It was so hard to get a site yada, yada, yada, and then when I did show up there were like four empty sites around me.” I’m sure that happens. There may be parks that are doing some kind of weird COVID spacing thing, although we’re certainly far enough away from other sites that I’m not sure if that’s an issue. We showed up to an absolutely JAM PACKED park. Today being Sunday, it’s a little less so. We’re around six o’clock in the evening now. You can hear our fire crackling. We are cooking apples in the fire while we wait for our coals to be ready to cook our potatoes. The park is not jam-packed right now. There are empty sites from people bailing out at two o’clock, and not all of them have filled back up yet.
We had some boneheads last night that stayed up very late and very loud until three o’clock in the morning. It was terrible. Folks, if you get the opportunity to put your small ones down and stay up late, don’t do it.
Pamela: Or do it but be mindful of the fact there are lots of people around you that are trying to sleep so use your quiet indoor voices.
Tim: It’s a pretty terrible experience for your neighbours. And don’t point lights around. Try to keep lights low and as dim as possible. Being as it’s right after the end of the school year, there are a lot of parents who seem to have run away from home with their children just to get them outside and let them scream somewhere other than at home.
Thomas: There are a lot of screaming children.
Tim: So it’s quite loud with very small high-pitched voices.
Thomas: Wildlife? Children? You never know.
Tim: I can’t say that I particularly mind. I miss those days! Boys, what are you thinking so far? What have you enjoyed, the beach?
Brandon: I like the lighthouse.
Pamela: We went for a lengthy bike ride to the lighthouse and back yesterday.
Thomas: It was actually a really nice, wonderfully smooth road not all gravel and stuff like a lot of bike trails are. The bike trail was a bit stony, with lots of limestone…
Pamela: On the way out we went over the limestone bike trail and then we came back via the road which was much nicer.
Brandon: Yeah.
Pamela: And the trees are just beautiful. The road goes right through some beautiful Carolinian forests. This park is supposed to have the most diversity of everything – bird life but also plant life.
Because Presqu’ile is situated on an old strip of land, there’s an interesting story about a ship that wrecked nearby. They were on the way from Toronto, which was called York at the time, and had stopped off at Oshawa to pick up someone who was charged with murder, along with several of the other people involved in the trial, and the ship went down somewhere between Oshawa and here and was never seen again. So both the accused and also all of the people involved in the trial were lost with the ship, which was called the Speedy. We were also looking at a map of several shipwrecks in the vicinity and thinking whoa, go diving and see if we can find some stuff.
Brandon: Scuba diving would be great around here.
Pamela: That and just standing on the beach and throwing rocks into the water. It’s very therapeutic and skipping stones. Brandon so far has the record for the most number of skips, how many 6? 7?
Brandon: 7
Tim: Yeah, it was a beautiful thing this morning to wake up to birdsong just to be surrounded by it in so many ways. And not crows, which is fabulous because I like crows conversing with each other at 5 a.m. almost as much as I like raccoons.
Thomas: I was gonna say at least we didn’t have raccoons. We haven’t encountered them in a negative way…
Pamela: …in our campsite. They’ve haven’t been here.
Thomas: yet.
Tim: We went over and we checked out the Nature Centre, which is quite cool as well. It was nice that they brought it outside (due to the pandemic) as best as they could. They brought the displays outside. The Park Rangers were enthusiastic to be standing out in the hot sun and having to wear masks and all that joyful business but it was nice. It was good to see the kids doing that sort of thing. It feels like it’s been forever.
Pamela: We went to the beach this afternoon and buried Brandon in the sand twice up to his neck. We took pictures. We have photographic evidence of that.
Thomas: For blackmail later, don’t know what for yet.
Pamela: And the beach is quite nice. Thomas was saying that next to us was a couple who drove here from Florida and they were admiring the aesthetically pleasing beach. It’s also wheelchair accessible, which is really awesome. The park has installed a mat to allow people to get from the parking lot to the beach in a wheelchair.
Tim: Yeah, just a brief bit about Presqu’ile, it’s a tombolo. It’s literally an island that’s connected to the mainland by a sandbar bar. When we went out to where the lighthouse is you can see far, far off. Lots of pretty colours in the water, very Caribbean looking colors in Lake Ontario. The water is quite shallow at the beach. The kids, at least one of them, wandered out into the water for the waves.
Pamela: The water is a bit brisk.
Tim: Yeah, well, Lake Ontario, I don’t think it’s ever warm.
Pamela: So the sand is lovely, the sand was very soft.
Brandon: Yeah, the sand is so soft.
Thomas: Yeah, and it actually wasn’t too hot either. It was super fine except for the shells that were in it which were kind of pokey.
Brandon: Yeah.
Pamela: So on our schedule for tomorrow is breakfast and take down. But, we’ll also try to stop by the marsh boardwalk on our way out of the park because there’s quite an extensive boardwalk that goes through a really awesome Marsh. And there are some interesting trees which I think I mentioned in the last episode that look like horseback.
Tim: I think that’s pretty much it. We’re looking like we’re into tossing potatoes into the fire into the coals range. So I think we’re gonna move on to dinner and enjoy our final evening here at Presqu’ile Provincial Park.
Pamela: That’s it for us for today. Thanks for joining us, and we will talk to you again soon. If you’d like to reach out to us, our email address is hi@supergoodcamping.com. And we would love to connect with you on all of the social media. We’re on Twitter, we’re on Facebook, we are on Instagram and we have a public camping group called The Campfire. Thank you talk to you again soon.
Brandon: Bye.
Thomas: Bye.
Tim: Cheers.