September 2, 2004

    I awoke that morning to the only thing that a man who drank many beers the night before could possibly awake to...I had to pee. 

    It had gotten pretty cold the night before, the lake was covered in fog as thick as pea soup and there was frost that I could write my name in on the life jackets.  I hadn't gotten much sleep that night either, as the moon had been so bright that I had to put my fleece over my face to get soon shut eye.  After taking care of the matter at hand, I also realized that cold sand is the equivalent of snow when walking in my bare feet.  It didn't take long for me to wedge my sandy feet into my socks and boots and start a fire. 

    That morning everything quickly became drenched in dew as the temperature rose with the coming of the rising sun.  As in the past, we had planned to make bacon and eggs on our first morning in the park.  Now I realize that it is not a good idea to have the smell of cooking bacon wafting through the bush in bear country, so in the past we have always precooked the bacon at home before bringing it.  But, in our rush to get everything together at the last minute this year, this minor detail was forgotten.  So there we were, in camp with a whole package of raw bacon...so we cooked it.

    It took forever that morning to cook breakfast.  For as nice as a beach is for sitting in the sun and enjoying a few drinks, it's also windy as hell.  We eventually ate our scrambled eggs and semi-cooked bacon (which slid down your throat with the grace of a Jamaican bobsled team), and quickly evacuated the premises.

    As a side note:  biodegradable soap DOES NOT cut grease...but nothing stuck to the cookware for the rest of the trip.

    Travel that day took us to Longbow Lake where we explored a small dam before heading down the portage to the third leg of the Tim River.  Although it took use longer than expected, this turned out to be the most interesting portion of the river that we traveled.  The waterway snaked and weaved its way along narrow passages through mature forest with swampy shores.  It was by far the nicest "swamp maze" that we have traveled since coming to Algonquin Park.  It was unlike any other swamp as there was quite a current in the cool water and the trees provided some much needed shade from the strong sun of the mid afternoon.  There were many beaver dams that required getting out of the canoes to coax them over, as well as shallows that required walking alongside our kevlar beasts of burden.

    It took most of the day to navigate this part of the Tim.  Again there were a few moments of uncertainty when drifting by tributaries, one moment in particular,  at a "Y" in the river marked with a note to Darlene.  We stopped for lunch on an unkept P90 portage trail which we traversed for no better reason than "because it was there..."  I guess we should've checked the river first.

    After more confusion due to the Canoe Routes of Algonquin Park map, we found our next portage, a P410 that would tee off to the P1330 to Queer Lake.  This being our longest portage up to this point in the trip, damn near killed us the first time over with our packs.  Carrying the canoes proved considerably easier.

    Welcome to Queer Lake...snicker snicker...let the jokes begin...

    A very small and oddly shaped body of water, we only really explored the upper part the lake.  We inspected a few different sites and settled on a roomy plot under the cover of some large cedars close to the portage trail that we would be following the next day.

    We ate an excellent meal of Greg's homemade chili that night, which made me glad that we all slept in separate tents.  We were also treated to some evening entertainment as a few other travelers chose to travel in the dark.  We watched the flashlights come down the portage trail to the waters edge and listened curiously to the clump-clump sounds that only fumbling in a canoe in the dark could make as they made their way towards the beacon of our fire.  It turns out they were looking for their friends Danielle & Thomas who were also supposed to be camped on that lake.  We told them that we had seen another camp earlier, setup on the other side of the narrows towards the queerer side of the lake.

    Everyone was pretty tired again from a long day of travel and was really looking forward to getting to our next site were we would hopefully spend the next 2 days relaxing.  We planned an early start so that we could get first dibs on a good site on Ralph Bice (AKA Butt) Lake.