Pamela:
Hello and good day, eh? Welcome to the Super Good Camping Podcast. My name is Pamela
Tim:
and I’m Tim
Pamela:
And we’re from supergoodcamping.com. We are here because we are on a mission to inspire other families to enjoy camping adventures such as we have with our kids. We’re freshly back from our trip to Pog Lake at Algonquin Provincial Park, so we wanted to talk a little bit about our car camping experience there.
Tim:
Yeah, so I think it’s Pog Lake Kearney, but it was our first trip to that part of the park. Very cool. We stayed on site number 466 in campground C. We were right beside a dam, a bridge over the waterway beside us which was a small river. The dam leads to a biking path. We were at a dead end, although a great number of people didn’t grasp the concept of No Exit on the sign.
Pamela:
There were a lot of cars that drove down and then went: “Oh, I guess I can’t go here.” So then they backed up again.
Tim:
Yeah, it was a sad statement about some people, but it was a great deal of entertainment. It was like “oh, look, here comes another one.”
Pamela:
This is the 20th one today!
Tim:
Anyhow, yeah, it was a wonderful little park. We had a big, big site, with a decent amount of privacy, and there was nobody behind us. Nobody. We only had somebody on one side of us and I suppose across the road, although we only heard them the first day or second day, maybe. We had great weather. It poured, an absolutely torrential downpour on the way up on Monday so we stopped in Huntsville for a very leisurely lunch to try to ride it out. We were watching our weather apps to see when it was going to taper off a little bit and we showed up at Pog Lake with absolutely perfect timing.
Pamela:
Yeah, it started to lighten up and so we got set up in kind-of light sprinkling but it wasn’t raining.
Tim:
I wouldn’t even call it a drizzle. Sure we were soaked by the end of it, but it was okay. It was not what we were driving up in. You couldn’t see anything. Man, it was brutal! Tuesday dawned, which was cool and damp.
Pamela:
Cool and damp, yep. I went for a bike ride on the bike trail Tuesday morning early. I actually woke up super early, like six o’clock in the morning and I had the whole park to myself for two hours. It was wonderful. It was so quiet and serene. I went for a bike ride and I went for a walk to the beach all by myself, and it was really great. Then the rest of the day was pretty cool and damp and overcast and we just chilled by the fire for most of it.
Tim:
Yeah, we actually started a fire about lunch’ish, like two in the afternoon, maybe something like that. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we’re absolutely gorgeous days. So weather-wise, we certainly won the lottery there and we went out and did some stuff in the park.
Pamela:
We went over to the Logging Museum, which is really cool. It’s a building but most of the museum is actually outside so you walk on a trail to all of the exhibits. The exhibits walk you through the history of logging in Algonquin. Together with some really cool information that neither of us knew like the fact that about half of the able-bodied men in Ontario would go up to the logging camp for the winter and spend the winter there helping to log the trees.
Tim:
Yeah, that was pretty wild. What a brutal lifestyle. Holy mackerel! There you essentially wash your hands and your face and nothing else for seven months.
Pamela:
And in a cabin stuck, with no windows in the cabin…
Tim:
and 50 other guys! Yeah, nasty. Let’s not talk about it. It’s good to live in a modern society. We did that trail, and we went to the visitor centre as well which is pretty cool. Very interactive, you push a button and you get told the story of Algonquin. There were great displays.
Pamela:
It was very much like the ROM [Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto] if you’ve been to the ROM, except it was on a smaller scale, but all about Algonquin Provincial Park and the wildlife and it was cool. And there we learned about brain worms.
Tim:
Yeah, brain worms and winter ticks.
Pamela:
Which is awful.
Tim:
These are having a pretty brutal impact on the moose population in the park. That’s one of the iconic things about Algonquin Provincial Park. They were at an all-time high of about 4400, something like that, and they’re down now to about 1500, so that’s poopy. What else did we do? Oh, the Beaver Pond Trail.
Pamela:
The Beaver Pond Trail. We went for a guided hike. The park rangers are always really wonderful. The naturalists lead us on a hike around a two-kilometre trail, they lead us for one kilometre of it. Just through the area where a beaver has built a dam and where they’re inhabiting that area. It’s kind of cool to see the actual structure that they’ve built. Some of the cool information that we learned included the fact that beavers instinctively will build a dam where they hear the sound of rushing water. So someone put a speaker with the sound of rushing water and, lo and behold, beavers came along and built a dam around the speaker. It was kind of cool to learn little factoids like that. There was also the fact that beavers have orange teeth in Algonquin Park. The mineral content of the water is fairly high in iron and the water lilies pick up the iron from the water then the beavers eat the water lilies, which concentrate some of the iron and it then ends up in the beaver’s teeth.
Tim:
Yeah, the water lilies are their favourite food apparently.
Pamela:
And moose really quite like them too apparently.
Tim:
Not beavers, water lilies.
Pamela:
Maybe humans should eat water lilies.
Tim:
Wolves like beavers, though, a third, roughly 30% of a wolf’s diet in Algonquin is beavers. That’s pretty wild. We saw the evidence. We saw the scat of a wolf while we were there.
Pamela:
There was quite a bit of fur in it.
Tim:
Quite a bit, and it was pretty fresh too. So that was interesting. Pamela was fairly disappointed that she saw literally no wildlife. She saw a frog and a couple of grouse, and a chipmunk. A very persistent chipmunk.
Pamela:
He was a regular visitor and a squirrel
Tim:
and a red tail squirrel
Pamela:
and the squirrel would actually run up my leg and then run up my back. It was after whatever it was I was drinking, I think it was some hot chocolate at the time and he thought that sounded like a good thing to share.
Tim:
Yeah, Pamela explored the campground more than I did. There was a beach, a small beach.
Pamela:
Yeah, the swimming was really good because Pog Lake is a relatively small lake, so the water temperature was really nice. It wasn’t cold. It was one of those ones that you need to adjust to when you first get in, but it wasn’t really super cold, and the beach was nice. It was small. When I was there, there wasn’t a tonne of people at the beach. It was easy enough to find some space. It is a smallish beach but anyway it was really nice for swimming
Tim:
Just thinking about the number of people, there was a surprising number of empty sites and now admittedly we were there through the week, not on the weekend. I looked to see if we could extend our stay at either end, either go up earlier or stay later, just for fun, just to take a look at it and it was a sea of red. We went Monday to Friday. We could have booked for the Sunday beforehand. We could have booked the site across the road from us I’m guessing 465, though I want to say 461, I’m not positive, and that was it. There was nothing else in campground C available but there was a whack of empty sites, so I’m not sure what that means. I don’t know if they were saving them or if people booked them and then did their trip. Maybe they were playing the game where you book five months plus the 23 days and then cancel the days they don’t actually intend to be there. I don’t know what that was all about. It was kind of strange. It made for a nice quiet park though other than maybe an RV running a generator to recharge its batteries starting at noon and going until eight o’clock at night, not that that was an issue for me right? Everybody gets to get out and get some time out there. There were no goofs this time, which was nice. There was a fellow that was playing guitar. That was nice to listen to as well. It was good. It was nice. It’s a nice campground. Busy would not be a word I would use so that was wonderful.
Pamela:
We were super missing our kids. It was just the two of us. We were like empty nesters for the week. It was very strange. Every time a family biked by, a lot of them did bike by on the way to the bike trail, we would hear the little kid voices.
Tim:
The little voices, yeah.
Pamela:
And then be like, “Oh, we have no kids with us.”
Tim:
It’s the first time in 20 years.
Pamela:
Yes.
Tim:
Yeah, that’s crazy. Vault toilets were the usual vault toilets, they were just fine. The comfort station was good and clean. It wasn’t crazy busy. There was no lineup. I went up and walked right into an empty shower. No problem at all. No problem brushing my teeth. I can’t speak for the ladies side, but on the men’s side, there are three sinks. They’re often just cold water, just whatever temperature the water is that is running through the pipes in the ground. This is what sometimes they do. This was a nice one where they had a warm water one that was timed. You push a button and it would run for X amount of seconds. I even shaved halfway through the week, which is relatively unheard of. I usually can’t be bothered.
Pamela:
Finally, our site was right on the Madawaska river. So that’s where the dam that Tim mentioned was, going over the Madawaska river. A couple of people near us took their canoe down and launched their canoe into the Madawaska and went off for a bit of a paddle one day that we were there too, which was really an awesome idea. Yeah. So we were right next to the Madawaska river and then you could walk to the far end of the campground from where we were to get to the beach on Pog Lake. So there was a lake on one side and there was the Madawaska river on the other.
Tim:
It was funny as far as other amenities we didn’t have to check in at the front office. We just had to carry our reservation with us so I don’t think we noticed the lack of a store or anything like that. You could buy wood but I think that was pretty much it.
Pamela:
There was a park store at the East gate. It was teeny. There was hardly anything. They didn’t even have firestarters there. There is a Lake of Two Rivers store which is about midway through the park, right off Highway 60. We didn’t go in. It was pretty busy looking when we did go by on our way home on Friday.
Tim:
We did manage to go into three outfitters on our trip. I don’t have issues!
Pamela:
We had to hit them all, lol.
Tim:
We hit Algonquin Outfitters. What road is that on now?
Pamela:
That’s off Highway 60, too.
Tim:
It’s on Highway 60. It’s closer to the West gate. Anyhow, it’s a fantastic place. Check out my Google review. It was awesome. I picked up a new Kevin Callan book. I don’t even know what the heck else that I came out of there with, some paracord.
Pamela:
Some tape.
Tim:
Oh, Tenacious Tape, which was great. I knew that I wanted a tape. I couldn’t come up with the tenacious part. I went and looked around. I found some patching kits. I found some odds and sods tape. I couldn’t find the Tenacious Tape. I went back down to the front and asked one of the young ladies. She went through everything in order to find it because I didn’t have anything to offer to her other than its tape for repairing tents and canoes and stuff like that. She found it. I was like “yay that’s great.” That’s the stuff that I wanted. Where else did we go? We did Opeongo Outfitters just outside of Whitney. By outside, I mean like a minute outside of Whitney, which is just beyond the East Gate of Algonquin. It was okay. Mostly clothes and merchandise. There was some outfitting gear but not a tonne. I will say regarding aesthetics, all of the rental canoes, which I think are all Swift canoes at Algonquin Outfitters are all relatively spanky new. I doubt any of them have more than a year on them, I would say max two years, but they’re all shiny and stuff. I don’t think it affects the seaworthiness of it but the Opeongo ones were beater-looking things. They were scratched all up and they were definitely used. If I was sitting in a shiny one. I would try hard to not scratch it. If I was sitting in a scratched-to-death one, I don’t think I’d care, just saying. Whitney was a little blink and you miss it town, not much there to speak of.
Pamela:
There was a grocery store, which was pretty tiny. Not a lot of selection of things. There’s a small LCBO.
Tim:
Yeah.
Pamela:
There was a post office.
Tim:
Yes. There was a tiny, tiny post office. A little craft place. I think that was it. Yeah, it was itty bitty. At the Opeongo Outfitters, there was a chip truck. Good chips. That was yummy. We picked up a couple of bags of wood that burned about the same as park wood, so I’ve got nothing to say about that.
Pamela:
There was a little bit of sizzle to the wood [it was wet].
Tim:
On the way and then again on the way back, we stopped at Huntsville for a bite to eat. We went to a different place. That was a bit of a thing. A little strange, but it was good food when we finally did get it. Then we went to the Algonquin Outfitters there and had a wonderful chat with a fellow that used to live in Toronto. I think he’s just a greeter, I honestly don’t know what his job was there. But we yakked about camping and canoeing like it was nothing. I have a thing about doing that.
Pamela:
Tim found a kindred spirit.
Tim:
So it was perfect. It was wonderful. So all in all, you can’t go wrong in Algonquin. A million years ago I went to Rock Lake. It’s a wonderful campground but there are literally no trees, so essentially zero privacy between sites other than the size of them. They’re not right on top of you. There were way more trees at Pog Lake, still, you’re in Algonquin. You’re near camping. There are no moose in the middle of the summer.
Pamela:
They don’t like the hot weather, apparently, they’re more of a cold-weather animal.
Tim:
Yeah, so they’re in where they can be in lakes and stuff all the time to cool off. Yeah, I think that’s it.
Pamela:
That’s it for us for today. Thank you so much for listening. Please do connect with us on all social media, and then visit our website at supergoodcamping.com You can email us at hi@supergoodcamping.com and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye
Tim:
Bye