Neys Provincial Park, ONT to Neys Provincial Park, ONT: Daily miles 0.0, Total miles 593.4
The morning dawned bringing rain and finding Hannah and I totally lacking motivation. We had decided to do our laundry before we left, but we found it hard to even get out of the tent in the rain. Eventually the rain stopped and we gathered our clothes, mustering the energy to walk up to the washers. After the clothes had been washed and through one round of drying, we found them still wet, but we didn’t have any more change for the dryer. We had to walk around asking everyone if we could break our 2 dollar coin for two loonies. Eventually we did and got back to our laundry. During the course of all this we met Judy, who also happened to be struggling with the under-powered dryer. We got to talking about the trip and how her husband had just taken up kayaking. Eventually her husband, Bill, came in and we had a nice talk. We returned to our site at about 1 pm discussing whether or not we should move on or call this one a rest day, deciding we should at least get a few miles in for the day since the weather wasn’t too bad. As we ate our lunch and talked about packing up Bill walked up and looked over our boats and invited us to dinner. This officially killed our motivation and we decided to stay – it didn’t take much arm twisting. We decided to get the site for another night and were about to grab our money when a car pulled up and asked if we were going because he had just rented the site. We scrambled to move our stuff and Hannah took off to get us a site. She lucked out and got the next site down so that we didn’t have to move too far. I took another shower and relaxed until 6 pm when we left for dinner. Dinner was great. Good food, Chinese, and great conversation. It was so nice to have real conversations with other people who are enjoying life in the outdoors. It is really the great social interactions that are keeping this trip fun. The scenery, while still beautiful, becomes less special as you see it day after day and the paddling loses its novelty quickly, but meeting new and interesting people and seeing how they react to our trip has yet to lose its appeal. We got back to the park at about 8 pm and watched the sun set before retiring to the tent. I feel a little bad about not moving on a decent day, but it was so nice I can’t complain. The rain is falling outside the tent now and my motivation is renewed, at least for now.
