Charleston Lake Provincial Park

Peter and I started our camping season early this year during the last week of May. After a stressful drive through Toronto and running a bit late I met Peter on base in Kingston and we headed off to Charleston Lake Provincial Park. This location Peter picked and he loved it because it's highlight was great canoeing, and since Peter just purchased his own brand new canoe that appealed to him. The park was located about 40 minutes past Kingston and was a small sized park I would say. It had 3 loops of camp sites and several hiking trails, 3 small beachs and lots of water space. We stayed in the Shady Ridge loop on site 340 and it was spectacular amazing I was in love! There is a little video tour below to show off our awesome little location and my love for it :)

So since it was a long eventful picturful weekend so i'll break it down by day the same way as I did for my last camping post.

FRIDAY

We arrived in the early evening around 6pm and we were starving so we quickly unpacked and made dinner at the same time and then finished setting up the tent and then we went for a canoe ride. However this was the first time in the canoe with two of us so i get paranoid that we will flip and ruin my camera so I left it at camp until I got a good feel for the canoe

The only photo I have from friday is of dinner but it was scrumptious and so deserving of a picture

SATURDAY

Up at 630am, nothing unusual for Peter of course, we got to sit along our river view and just enjoy the morning air and the little water wildlife floating around lol, followed by breakfast - camping is pretty much all about what you eat, when you eat it, and when you'll be eat next - its great! key words, SNACKING SNACKING SNACKING

This was my trap for the chipmunks to join us for breakfast, there were about 3 that hopped around are site. Our site was covered with manyyyyy crunchy leaves, so even these tiny little 2 pound chipmunks sounded like hugeee animals bouncing through the leaves. They were awesome but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of them :(

So in the early afternoon we took a canoeing trip to explore around the waterways and we packed sandwiches and goldfish snackies. We stoppe at a picnic area which we nicknamed dragonfly point because there were thousandddddsss of them there. Peter and I decided that dragonflies are the best insect though because they do their job by eating mosquitos, they aren't pesky, you're never scared or annoyed by a dragon fly you just like to watch and enjoy them. sold!

Anyhow so we ate our lunch at the picnic stop, stepped in the water a bit, and then did a 2.0km hike around the area. it was very nice.

AMAZINGGG! we saw this dear on our little hike and it was almost surreal. We were literally like ten feet from it and i stopped dead like : | : | i turned to Peter like "ummm is that a real dear?!?!........" and it didn't even move it just stood there and stared at us, sooo great. I wanted to see another one but unfortunaetly that didn't happen.

On our canoe ride back to our site I snagged a few pictures and Pete notices and AWESOMEEEE turtle I could have looked at it all day but it was difficult in the canoe.

We returned to camp took a little rest and then went and laid on the beach, which quickly turned into napping on the beach, it was a little chilly.

"no open containers of alcohol off registered camp sites"

Took some time to explore the park on our bikes and look at all the other sites if we were to ever come back. We decided that our site and the site beside us were the best in the entire park!

DINNER TIME! burgers and friessss yummm. our original plan was to do fish and fries however we found out that the lake was filled with little bass which is not quite what we were looking for, so burgers were an awesome alternative, omg so good.

SUNDAY

Peter was annoyed by my photos :)

AHH SNAIL HOLOCAUST!!!!!!!!!

So sunday was our last day and we had to be off our site by 2pm. We got up at 830 and made breakfast then we went on one last canoe ride before we had to get the canoe back on the car. We packed a lunch and packed up our whole campsite and we were set off on our 10km afternoon hike by 1pm

This trail was very amazing i was completely in love. It was so well laid out there was no chance of getting lost. It told you every time you hit a kilometre so you knew how much longer you had. It had very hilly areas and very flat areas and tonssssss of different terrain; shady forest, wooden bridges, open grassy fields, sunny forest, pond areas, high level solid rock face, just tons of awesome! it took us 2 hours and 45 minutes given that we took a twenty minute lunch, stopped for some pictures and to take in the view, however we jogged some of it so rough estimate on the time.

At this point in our hike we had been jogging for about 1 km and i honestly thought that we were at like 6.5km so seeing this sign was horrid!

This exceptionally creepy little shack was at about the 8km point and was pretty much something straight out of a scary movie. Peter got close enough to take a picture but i was like hell nooo! He said he got some chills too.

This concluded the end of our spectacular camping trip! We had an absolute blast. We made our way back to Kingston, relaxed a bit on base and then went out on the motorcycle so Pete could show me a bit of Kingston. totally IN LOVEEEE with the city, its so cool and I would love to live there its so mellow. We went out to dinner at a place called Zappas and ate delicious food on the patio and people watched. Afterwards we got icecream and walked along the Kingston harbour. Perfect way to end our weekend. XO