Pinery

Well, we snuck one final camping trip in this year. We didn't officially decide to go camping until Friday afternoon so it was a whirlwind trip! We left after Izzy was done school and hoped to be able to get a decent site at the Pinery for the weekend.

We ended up getting a fairly nice site, although it was DIRTY!! The ground cover looks great at first glance (sand), but as Tanya Janssen had warned us, it's like there's ash mixed in with it. The kids were absolutely blackened by the 'sand'. It was a very dirty weekend. We were blessed with great weather though, which was a relief. We were expecting much more rain than we actually got (it only rained Friday night while we were in bed).

We had some pretty rough nights there. Joel forgot his inhaler and ended up having an asthma attack in the middle of the night. He debated between driving to Zurich to his moms (and hope she had an extra inhaler he could bring back), or head to Exeter and get an inhaler from the ambulance base. He tried desperately to ignore it and get some sleep, but I told him at 3 am that he'd better just drive out and get one! We weren't sure if they locked the front gate and didn't know if he'd be able to get back in (plus who wants to drive over half an hour at 3 am??). He did go though. Needless to say we were up lots that night.

Last night we had an awesome evening with dear friends Tim and Monica Doherty and their daughter Maia. Once the kids were asleep we were able to share in several hours of undisturbed conversation. It was super! When they headed to bed Maia woke up and gave them quite the challenge as she spent the better part of the night either crying or playing in their tent (poor things...hope you made it through today okay!!). So the nights were a little rough for us, but the days were great.

The picture above was taken at the beach (doesn't it look toasty warm...NOT). It must have been 12 degrees on the beach...and windy!! I couldn't believe there were actually people swimming. There were some pretty big waves and a very dark sky. The kids had an absolute blast being chased by the waves. Fun times!

In the end we decided that we definitely prefer MacGregor point to the Pinery, although as our friends reminded us, it depends on what appeals to the specific couple! We love MacGregor for the big sites, the bike trails, the playgrounds and the beach. Our friends Tim and Mo weren't very impressed, but they have a dog and were unable to spend much time as a family enjoying many of the features of the park with their dog along. The dog beach is not swimmable for people. This is not something we've ever considered of course, because we don't have a dog. It's pretty neat though, that each provincial park seems to over different benefits. For our family MacGregor is our best fit, but I know families that absolutely love the Pinery. We weren't too thrilled with the utter size of the park and the fact that you have to drive everywhere. We tried biking around, but you often have to bike on the roads (scary!), and the trails that we did bike on were extremely hilly (not good for the kids..had to walk their bikes quite a bit). We couldn't find a single playground, and the showers were horrible. I've heard that in the summer it's quite the party park with lots of noisy teens/young adults that camp there in groups. We were fortunate this weekend and had great neighbours!

Anyway, it was a cool, but fun weekend. Definitely our last for the year. School is really wearing Izzy out, so I hope she does okay tomorrow after a weekend of camping. We had her in bed by 6:45 tonight.

Joel asked me if I was sad that it was our last trip, but I'm ready to say goodbye to summer activities now. I'm starting to look forward to fall, Thanksgiving, jumping in the leaves, Halloween. Bring it on!!

Mel