Saturday, May 5, 2007

Bronte Creek (April 19, 2007)



Bronte Creek Provincial Park is run by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, and is located in Oakville. Visit the friends of Bronte Creek website here We were on Prarie Campground site 134.

Finally, our first trip in the new trailer. It was cold, darned cold!

We have had the trailer home for quite a while, and had worked on it a few times in order to figure out what we could fix, and what would need to be repaired at the shop. Now it was time to take it out on the road and figure out how this thing works! So, I packed the boys up for an overnight trip, and left everyone else at home. This basically means that I hitched 'er up, gathered some warm clothing, and tossed some food into a cooler. At this point, we are not really sure if the fridge is working properly, as it has not been hot enough outside to notice a difference.



Here is a shot of what the campground looked like on first arrival. Take a look at the beautiful photo at the top of this article for an interesting comparison. It was end of day, in the dreary days of April. I towed the Airstream very slowly down Hwy 5 to Bronte, watching how fast I was accelerating and braking, trying to be as gentle as possible. I pulled up to the front gate of the Provincial Park, only to see that the gate is up, and they are now following the honour system, ie. they are trusting us to pay and park properly. I am guessing because the one park staff had something else to do around 6pm.

So, I drove around and around the various circular driveways until we found our site. Which didn't matter much, as none of the trees had leaves, so there wasn't much to obscure us from the other sites any ways! I let the boys out, and they went foraging.




As you can see, they seem to enjoy bringing back firewood. And it keeps them busy!

Anyways, backed the Airstream up between 2 trees that left about 2 feet of clearance on either side, into a relatively flat location, put on the blocks, dropped the jacks, and ran inside to figure out how to heat the place up a bit. I found it a lot easier to do once I had the power connected and the lights on. The kids seemed to enjoy that more as well.




Anyways, the wind picked up, it got really cold, we tried for about 5 minutes to start a fire, and then we all settled into some pajamas and food cooked on the stove in the kitchen. Which was a lot of fun.




After supper, we all agreed to have a dance party. So, we turned on our new recently outfitted radio, and danced the rest of the evening away. I was a little crowded, but there were no major injuries.

The facilities at Bronte Creek were first rate - extremely modern and well-kept washrooms and showers, as well as excellent laundry.

The next morning the kids went over and explored the kids playground.



Quite a lot of fun!

We finally packed up in the early morning and towed everything back home. We all learned a lot about the trailer and trailer camping, and had a new list of things to do. And the kids really enjoyed it.