Two Birds with One Car

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We picked up the rental car in Pembroke around 9:00 (a 2007 Elentra). We were concerned about the 3000 km/week limitation on travel in the car, but the guy at the Discount said "don't worry about it" (we'll see about that).
The car was packed and we were on the road by noon, starting in Deacon, and heading to highway 17 via the B-line toad. It rained most of the way to our first stop in Mattawa.
We had both been to Mattawa before, since we had gone there on a boat trip last year with Dad and Mom, so we didn't bother stopping to see any of the large wooden statues that they had in town...we had a more important goal: the LCBO. After loading up with some tequilla, coolers, and some subs from Subway, we continued on to North Bay.
As we were told, North Bay had a large grocery store, so we stopped there to stock up. Our original destination for the first night was going to be Martin River Provincial Park, however we arrived there around 4:00 and decided it was too early to stop and pressed on towards Timmins. On highway 11, just before out first stop in Kettle Lakes Provincial Park, we noticed that a lot of the large trees along the side of the road had been uprooted, while others were severely bent. We assumed that they had some pretty bad storms to knock over such large trees.

As we drove northward, the evidence of Ontario's logging industry became more evident, with large areas of cut and replanted forests, stacks of logs and sawdust several stories high, and several of "forest product" plants.
Kettle Lakes Provincial Park was where we decided to stop for day 1. We arrived there around 7:00, only to find that there were no staff at the park. However they had an after hours self-registration system, where you drop the fee into an envelope and find yourself a site. We chose site 12, which was overlooking one of the small kettle lakes (there are over 20 in the park). The park itself was not very busy (maybe 5-10 other campers), and the area we were in was completely empty. We set up the tent and blew up the mattress and decided to put the tarp over the tent because it was supposed to rain. The horseflies were the size of housecats, but i still jumped in for a quick swim, and had a short chat with the field naturalist about the park. We had a feast of hotdogs and lemonaid and then headed for bed.
Our first day was a little hard on the wildlife, for we killed 10 butterflies, about 10 pounds of bugs and 2 birds with the car.

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Comments

[Ryan]

Take that nature!~! Good read guys, keep 'em comin'!!