Welcome to the Family, Little Red Caboose!

 For years, I've wanted a camping trailer. I grew up with a pop up Steury camper:

That's my fabulous late aunt. This picture was probably around 1980. My parents bought this trailer around 1976. It's totally a statement to the 70s decor principals. Green and white striped canvas, the big orange tarp... (this photo is a picture I took during a slide show...you know like the old days...)

Yellow-orange curtains, yellow panel on the fridge, cushions in a matching green with giant flowers. This picture was the summer of 1988 (I'm pretty sure, because I had cut my long hair short for our band trip to Florida that May).  

That trailer was a fortified tank. We took it off roading, and camped on Crown Land (land that is owned by the government of Canada and is just wilderness....accessed often through hydro line access roads...hydro is what we call electricty in Canada). 

This was at the far end of the hunt club my Dad belonged to. This would have been around 1987-1988. My Dad (the man closest to the truck, the other one pulling the winch cable was my boyfriend) and tried to turn around by driving in the shallow water, and the truck got stuck on a submerged log. That's an International Scout II, 1974? It used to be all yellow with wood vinyl sticker panels. What a beast. The woman on the log is my Mom. After they killed the truck battery using the winch, my Mom and Dad took the canoe across the lake (they had a small motor) to get to the hunt camp and find help. My boyfriend and myself (17?) were left to look after my 3 year old brother.  Yup. It was as crazy as it sounds. My parents didn't get back until after dark (and I think they ran out of gas for the motor). I honestly don't remember what happened after that. Keep in mind too, that my Dad had had a quadruple heart bypass the year or so before this!

In 1989 they bought a second hand Coleman trailer that would be easier for my Dad to manage. We took it on a 3-4 week road trip to Newfoundland and PEI. It was nice to be modern finally but it had it's own issues.

Like getting flat tires frequently. When I went off to university in the fall of 1990, I got to take the fridge from the Steury. It was great! 

When Rob and I started dating, we bought a tent. I had tent camped on canoe trips, but I missed having a trailer! My parents bought a Hi-Lo which we borrowed in the fall of 1999 for a road trip, and while it was great, it wasn't perfect either (Rob is too tall to sleep widthwise in trailers!). 

When our kids were little, his parents passed their tent trailer on to us. It was an ingenious little trailer. 

They had used it all the time when the kids were going up, in the 70s. This is the back of the actual trailer, it opens up to be the kitchen, and hence, the front of the camper.  The roof tips open to one side and became the floor.

This is the tongue, or the front end. There is a zip on room covering the kitchen area at the back, and to the right is where the roof opens, laying on the ground and providing a second bed. 

This was during set up. You can see the hard floor, which is actually the roof. I don't remember exactly how the bunk worked on that side. I believe the other bunk slide out, as seen in the picture above. 

It was a cool tent, but there were issues with the zippers--it was 30-40 years old when we were using it. We considered getting new canvas made, but our kids were not the happiest campers when they were little, and we passed the trailer on to an eco-retreat/farm. 

When the kids were a bit older, we bought a second, larger tent (our first was very small, 2 person). That lasted for awhile, considering we didn't camp that often. Years later, 10 years ago, we bought another large tent, and went on a 10 day road trip to Quebec with the kids. We used a box trailer that Rob had, and he built a shelf at one end to use as a kitchen, complete with a bracket for our patio umbrella, and a cord to plug in a fluorescent light fixture. Yes, like from the garage. He rigged it up in the patio umbrella. However, we found out they don't like bright lights in Quebec "national" parks! 

For years, I tried to get him to invest in another trailer. The pod or teardrop style became popular, but there was always the issues of where to store it, and how would he fit in it anyhow. We went to the RV show and camping show a couple times. I loved the Safari Condo by Alto. Expensive. Rooftop tents became popular but I flat out refused to sleep on top of the FJ Cruiser. Rob saw a few off road trailers, but they were so expensive. It felt like we were going to be tenters forever. 

I still kept my eye on Facebook Marketplace, to see if anything interesting would come up. A little red trailer showed up last summer, but I didn't pay attention. Rob saw it though. He felt it was more than he wanted to spend.  It was still available this winter, and the price dropped a little. We decided it was time. It was unique, rugged, off-road capable. We drove the 1.5 hours to go see it. 

The cabinet in front of Rob opens downwards, and it's the kitchen. There's a two burner stove that slides out, and the back of the door has a cutting board. There's also storage. There's a large water tank with faucet beside the cute little propane tank.   The awning is also really good quality.

We have called this cavity, The Crypt. It will be where our fridge goes, on a slide out.

I've been against getting a roof top tent for on the truck, but this one isn't nearly as high. It is small though.  That cabinet is the same as the one on the other side, but no stove or cutting board. 

They moved very slightly on the price, and we went for lunch to discuss it. Of course we were going to get it!! We've named it the Little Red Caboose.  We went back last week to pick it up, from Mobilife RV in Kitchener. 

They cleaned it up SOOOOO nice. I thought the cutting board would be trash, but it's spotless. The stove had been a little disgusting, but it's like new. A new battery. And, the previous owner dropped off a brand new side cabinet!! No hardware for it, but we can get that. Rob was trying to figure if there's a way to mount it as a 3rd cabinet, but he might just keep it in the garage for storage until we need it.

This company, AT Overland made this model up to a few years ago but this one is from 2006.. This is the Horizon. They have another model without the side cabinets, but they do mainly truck conversions now.

First purchase was a hitch thingy so it would tow level.

The next upgrade was a new rooftop tent. I suggested we try this one out first, but Rob wasn't interested. It's considered 2 person, but yeah, it would be tight. We went to the Sportsman Show so we could see a variety of tents in person, and decided on a Amber Adventure tent, a ginormous one. The bed will be bigger than we have at home I think!

In other news, I've started a YouTube Channel, to chronicle our adventures, and to go along with our Instagram. I'll let you know once I start to post. 

Mont Tremblant National Park Day 4, Roughing It in the Campground

 We got up and the power was still off. We're camping, what could be wrong with no power in the campground? We had the battery pack for the fridge and if we needed to charge it, we'd just go for a drive. We had a camp stove, and rechargeable lights. What could be wrong? I used to wilderness camp every summer!

Well. It's a weekend, at a very popular campground. Nearly every of the 98 sites and 5 cabins were in use. How many people?

Rob went to the comfort station. The bathrooms were locked. The handicapped bathroom couldn't be locked but had one of those "Closed for cleaning" bars across the door. He went in anyway. Someone had covered the bathroom in toilet paper. The toilet was filled of poop, and the floor had been urinated on. 

Okay, but what about outhouses? Surely there's outhouses? And a handpump for water? You know the old fashioned ones with the big handle? Nope.

There was ONE single outhouse for the entire campground. No water pumps. 

There could have been 400 people there! The outhouse was far enough that it warranted driving. We actually had to wait.

We drove to the registration building and they had no power too. We asked if there were more outhouses and they said no. We asked why and they said it wasn't warranted. What?! Seriously? There are winter activities in some parts of the park, I don't know about there, but only 1 outhouse?! I really hope they re-think this. Keep it locked up unless there's an emergency. Power outages are pretty frequent from what we hear. 

They also said there was no refunds because of the power outage. Somewhat understandable, but we had no potable (drinkable) water! (Well, we did have a 2L jug in the fridge, but we weren't using that to wash dishes). 

I did notice these meat sticks in the shop--these are from where we live! They had a generator running to keep the ice cream treats frozen but that was it. 

We went in to St Donat for gas and to charge the battery. The staff had said power was out "even in the town" but we found there was power there. Maybe they meant the tiny village just outside the park. I'm not sure what else we did in town.

We went for a walk to see what was at "Blue Jay Point".  It wasn't on the map but there was a sign.  We followed the sign but we didn't see anything except some rocks and tree saplings in an area that looked like maybe it used to be a fire pit and seating area.  We then went down the path near our campsite. The path isn't on the map but there's a symbol saying "Discovery Activities". The symbols and legend are so tiny, and it doesn't show exactly how to get there. Go down the path near the bike rack at the very back of the campground.

What do you think this was?

It's a nice little area. You can probably walk along the beach all the way. When we went to the beach the first time we walked back a LONG way along the beach and then the trail went into the trees a bit, but then we went uphill and came out at a campsite that is on the main road (42-52....the area where the outhouse is). 

This is the star gazing bench. It would have been amazing to come down to star gaze. I laid down for awhile, but I did find it a bit awkward to get the right position. I'm so short and I didn't get lined up right, but with a blanket and maybe pillow, it'd be really comfy.

This was my view. Yeah, no stars. 

We headed back to the campsite and had lunch. Rob wasn't feeling well so I encouraged him to have a nap--something he usually does a lot when we road trip. I wanted to go for another walk and he didn't. So I went down the main trail, the Chutes-aux-Rats trail.

It was pretty easy walking, and there were quite a few other people out, especially close to the campground. There's a few benches and tables in nice spots along the trail. I even found another outhouse, but it was a 15 min walk from our campsite. 

Mushrooms are always fun to take pictures of. They don't move like flowers.

The signs indicated that the path to Chute-aux-Rats was closed. I had seen signs at the buildings but didn't really know what that was about. 

Shortly after I got back from my walk, around 3:30, the lights came back on! We wait about 15 minutes and went to wash our dishes. The washrooms stayed closed for awhile longer since they needed to be cleaned.

We had left them plugged in so we'd know when the power came on. We had been told 5:30, so we were excited it was earlier. 

We had another delicious dinner, trying to use up food. 

We were sitting at the fire in the evening, enjoying the peace and ....well...there was a large group down the hill with a lot of happy, excited kids. Almost every site was full.  Anyway, we moved the table over to the fire, and were just relaxing when suddenly I got startled by a voice beside me! It was a park ranger, walking site to site, to remind us to turn off the string lights when we go to bed. We had gotten in trouble in a Quebec park before because we had a bright light in our makeshift kitchen (Rob had fixed up the box trailer to have a sort of kitchen area at the end, complete with a large patio umbrella and fluorescent light fixture). I thought the string lights were pretty tame. They were low, dim, orange.  We had turned the lights off the other nights, so we figured this was just a routine walk about. She was friendly about it too. 

It was a somewhat early night since we were leaving pretty early in the morning, hopefully. 

Mont Tremblant National Park, Day 4, Diable Sector

I woke up in the morning, and Rob wasn't at the campsite. I quickly found him, enjoying the porch across the "street" LOL. 

Rob went to the registration building while I was doing morning stuff, and got the story about the road closure. The staff's English wasn't as good as the man the night before, but he gave him a park map and showed where the road was closed. It had just closed the month before after a bad storm, and they wouldn't get it fixed this summer. So, to go from the St Donat/Lac Provost sector to the Diable/Mt Tremblant sector, you have to leave the park and drive the long way around. However, after the drive the night before, I didn't that was too bad of an idea. I wasn't expecting the road through the park to be washboard gravel. Maybe when there's constant traffic on it, it's in better shape, but I thought it would at least be paved.

We decided to take the long route and see what we could find coming in from the other end. That's where the cool visitor centres are.

This is the one thing I really love at the Discovery Centre. It's a really nice place to go for souvenirs, snacks, or a comfy chair while it's raining. I picked up some souvenirs for myself and my mom, and some snacks made by local companies. I got a glow in the dark star chart that's more durable than the cardstock one I have that you can't see in the dark, and a t-shirt with a French saying ("time spent in the forest is not lost time"). I also bought a camp kitchen towel so I don't have to bring my home kitchen towels.

There are taxidermized animal displays that are cool to see. 

There's also a nice little dock on a lake. There were all these mid-sized fish. Looking at a poster later, my best guess was white striped sucker, but I'm not totally sure.

What a nice place to sit. That red-brown water is so iconic to me, it's what I knew growing up. The turquoise lakes of the Rockies were bizarre. Cool, but also...a little creepy. This is nostalgia. This is every summer of my childhood.

We left the Discovery Centre and almost immediately, I noticed a temporary sign on the road, indicating deer. Indeed, in a tiny meadow across from the Discovery Centre were a herd of deer having a nibble. When we had camped in the Lac Chat campground with the kids, there were deer everywhere. We didn't see any over at Lac Provost.

We headed back down the road to the first waterfall on the Diable River, Chutes Croches. We had taken the kids on these hikes when we had come before and they were not impressed with "hiking" except for the jerky I had made and brought. 

This was them when I told them there was a second hike and they weren't getting anymore jerky or fruit leather until after the hike.

We thought this tree was really cool. It looked burnt, and twisted.

We continued up the road to Chute du Diable. 

This was the kids back in 2016! No wonder people thought Megan and Lucy were twins. Now, Megan is 4" taller than Lucy!

This rock face at the look out (we think the upper level) provided a fun mini photo shoot back then. This time, there was a couple sitting on the bench so we didn't want to intrude, and I made Rob pose on a nearby rock face instead.

On our walk back (it's really not a hike, but also, the family carrying a stroller probably wouldn't consider it a "walk"), I saw something run across the path ahead of us. I thought at first it was a squirrel, but its body was too long.

It ran back across the path and I realized it was a mink!! Although my mom has had some around her pond, I'd never seen one! This picture below was the best I could do.

The loon being fed, and the mink, were two of my best moments from this trip!

We were ready for lunch and didn't really know where to go. We'd see a sign with a picnic table, but didn't know how far in, and they weren't on the map. So we decided that at the next campground, we'd pull in and find an empty spot and have a quick picnic. The crazy thing is, there were this little campgrounds all along the road, but they weren't marked on the map! Some of the campgrounds were, but not the one we stopped at.

We kept it quick. All I could think of was when we tried to find our campsite in the municipal campground in Grand Falls, NB. It was the only vacant site, and the site we thought it was, had a couple eating dinner at the table. Awkward!!

We continued up the road and cam to Camping du Lac-Escalier. We had to wait 5 min for the staff member to return from his break. At the entrance to this campground, the road that continued on was barricaded. We asked just how "impossible" was it to continue. He spoke good English, but was struggling. He said "like, Mission Impossible."  He also said that he hadn't actually seen the damage. We asked if we could walk to it and he didn't know. So we decided to walk.

We set a limit of 10 min and then we'd turn around. We went about 12 minutes because we both have the curse of  "just to the next bend".  We didn't make it there and have no idea of how much further it would be.  It was a nice walk though. As you can see, there is traffic on the road. We were told they weren't going to repair it until the spring, so what's going on? We could see the barricade had been moved aside and Rob asked me to move it for him but I refused LOL.

Basically, it says you can be kicked out if you go past!

We had to admit defeat. I said I'd do some detective work when we got home and see if I could find pictures. Unfortunately, even a request to Sepaq hasn't yielded anything. They just said it was closed for safety and they appreciate us respecting the closure. 

On the way back, we stopped at the Lac Monroe visitor centre for firewood. The map said there was "ready to eat" food here but all we saw was grocery and snack items.  Prices weren't too bad, even for the camping items like one burner stoves and even Starfrit frying pans. 

For firewood, you get two pieces of twine, and you choose your own wood and stack it in this contraption. 

The pictures make it look much bigger than it is!

Rob of course tried to stack it as high as possible. The first try, the twine was not in the right place so he had to stack it again. It was hard to tie the knot with barely any twine tails. And, it did fall apart on the way to the truck!

On the way back, we stopped at the IGA in St Donat. It's a great store! Lots of Quebec food options, and the deli, cheese, and desserts looked great! One thing we picked up was a ready to bake pizza, which we cooked on the BBQ. We even got a dessert which was a lovely treat while camping.

We had some trouble lighting the fire. We didn't have a lot of cardboard or paper, and we didn't want to turn too much of the firewood into kindling! We did find a few small sticks in the campsite and on the road, but we won't go into the forested parts to get wood. Plus, much of it was wet from the rain earlier.

Although we spent a lot of time in the truck, we managed quite a few steps this day too!

It was quite cool, and we were tired, so we opted to skip a shower and just do the dishes and our teeth. As we finished up, it started POURING. The wash up station is covered, but not closed in. A man pulled up and asked if there was anyone in the lady's washroom. I asked if it was his wife and kid, they were in the shower when I went in.

Then, before they came out, the power went out!!! I'm sure there was emergency lighting, but man, imagine being in the shower with a young kid and the power goes out! They had taken lights with them because it was already dark, but wow.

We got back to our site and it was already quite wet! Our tent was still dry. Rob hooked the fridge up to the battery pack and we went to bed, because it was already 9:45. We did get up later to go to the bathroom, and the power was still out. We used the handicapped washroom and there was no emergency light. The water barely flushed, and the door couldn't be locked. There was no water in the taps.

Surely the power would come back on soon?