Chutes

Another nice provincial park in Ontario. Parks here seem to provide lots of space and vegetation screening between campers. That’s very nice. On the other hand, when they say the sites have hookups, the power pole may be quite a ways away and shared with other sites. We kind of remembered this from before, but not enough to have brought our super long 30 amp cord. It didn’t matter in this particular site, but it did factor in to our planning the next morning.

We arrived with enough time and light after dinner to go hike the trails around the water feature. The falls are clearly the attraction for this tiny park, and they are impressive. The Twin Bridges trails are well signed and can cover up to around 4 miles if you do all the loops.

The interior trails run through deep forests of birch and various deciduous trees. We saw lots of low growing plants that we looked up. Some were creeping dogwood, and some were in the lily family, called Blue-bead Lily. It is was a very pleasant way to end the day.

Beginning the next day was not so nice. It was already raining from the get go, and one look at the weather was enough to make us completely regroup and change plans. The forecast was solid thunderstorms and heavy rain across the entire region. No punching through, from the looks of the radar. The next day looked delightful and that made us question how much we wanted to get to our next destination. We pondered all kinds of scenarios and ended up deciding to stay put another day. I jumped online and got a site with hookups, but you have to be careful about those power poles, so we previewed it. Then I took a shower, and we packed and hitched up to move and check in at the kiosk. By the time all that happened, and we were parked at the kiosk, I looked at weather again and everything had changed. Now the forecast was much more tame. Back to the drawing board. We quickly made the decision to go ahead and push on to at least cross the border. The place we originally planned to get to was not a huge draw, so roughly anywhere would do.

So Chutes remained the one night stay we had planned for, and I think that was fine. Once you’ve done the trails and have seen the water feature, there isn’t a whole lot else to keep one busy, at least not in the rain. We are proud of ourselves for being super duper flexible campers with the weather. That’s something we are actively trying to get better at. And we learned that you can use all the data to make choices, and then when the data changes, it is ok to flip.

Total miles from Driftwood: 224.7, 15.8 mpg (windy), 6 hours 8 min. Site 94 no hookups. Some potential for solar. Good dump. 1-2 bars LTE for both. Good trash and recycling by entry kiosk.