Birthday Fun at Grundy Lake Provincial Park

For those of you that don’t know, I turned 40 this past Monday.

So, to celebrate, we rounded up our kids, readied our shedding yellow dog, gathered our camping gear, and headed to Grundy Lake Provincial Park for and overnight escape.  While it may seem strange to drive three hours north for one night in a tent, it’s a park with special significance.  It happens to be the place my family camped nearly every summer when I was growing up.

I remember one pre-teen Grundy birthday scavenger hunt.  I biked around the campground looking for clues my family crafted.  It was a dismal failure.  I found a few paper hints but not enough to make it fun. I cried a lot that day.  I remember screaming, “It’s my birthday!  Why did you have to make the hunt so hard?”  I think that was the year we ended up driving to Sudbury to get a special birthday coconut cream pie to make amends for the frustrating clue chase.

I remember one year (not for my birthday) when my university-aged brother and I drove to the park without our parents.  We canoed to an isolated lake to fish and camp in the backcountry.  I enjoyed fishing then.  But that trip fished me out.  Since that time I’ve lost all desire to pick up a rod.  I think it was a combination of the quality of small pike we caught and the long, boring days sitting in the canoe with the terrible stinging itch of deer fly bites on my exposed ears and feet.

One year my whole family tried backcountry camping to parts of Grundy with no backcountry sites.  We rented a second canoe and our ill equipped family-of-five strapped our bulky sleeping bags, orange bubble pads, and an assortment of other heavy gear into the canoes.  I still remember the taste of my sweat and the feel of my drenched warm cotton t-shirt as we clamoured over rocks and around blueberry bushes with our 10,000 lb. canoes.  Thankfully we figured out a way to leave our canvass behemoth tent at home and we found a swimmable lake at the end of each near deadly portage.

Then, I stopped going to Grundy.  I grew up, got married, had kids.

Then, things changed.  Two years ago I took my wife and kids camping at Grundy.  I booked a site a month or so in advance. Unbeknownst to me, my parents & my brother and his family had booked sites just a couple of spots down from where we were going to land–the same week as us.  It came up in conversation weeks before we arrived so our surprise happened in advance of tent pitching.  It turned out to be a highlight for our whole family.

So, back we went on Sunday for my birthday.  After making so many good memories at that park it was great to add a few more.  Here’s a shot of my birthday sunrise at Grundy Lake.  That’s two of my favourite people in the foreground.