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A good friend of mine owns some lake front property out in the country side where there is no building, however, a road and clearing was prepared for him so it is treated as a private camping ground. For the past three years I have gone with him over Canada Day weekend to what he calls the Dad & Kids Camping Weekend. He has done it years before but I only started going three years ago and this year I decided to document it.

Here is Lac de la Carpe and the star shown is about where his property is.

When you first arrive at his unmarked driveway (unmarked because he has no building) you first come upon a gate, which was just installed this past Thursday.

The next three photos shows his street down to the clearing. There is a slight curve to it that allows for the camp site to be hidden from the road.

It was only two families (mine and the owner) who arrived Thursday morning and that is about when I took these first photos, so none of the other tents of the other Dads had arrived yet. Here is the camp site before those other Dads arrived:

Earlier this year he came up and completed the work on a water tower. At the lake he has a gas powered pump that pumps water from the lake into these two rain barrels and then gravity has the lake water from the rain barrels pushed back down to the campsite. This water was used for the toilet in his camper as well as for washing the dishes, but we brought our own drinking water separately.

Here is the campfire.

And here is the campfire again:


This screen tent is good for keeping the bugs out, but not the rain, so we threw the tarp on top knowing that Friday evening rain was expected. This became the lego tent as many of the boy kids brought lego.

Behind the camper is his wood pile.

There is rather of a steep hill to get down to the water and so years ago, soon after he acquired the property, he built the stair case that you see in the next few photos.

Here is a photo looking back up the stair case.

Where the steps come almost to the end there is a landing that is evidence of an old road that used to run the circumference of the lake, looking left we can see it go only to the next property.

Looking right, even though there is a wood pile in the distance, the 'street' continues past the property.

After the last few steps we get to the dock and the lake.

This panorama photo is from the end of the dock, hopefully it turns out.

So more people arrived resulting in new tents being added, some here:

And some here.

While sitting around the fire it would happen occasionally that I would discover some of the very small wildlife that was around us. Here are two videos showing just a bit of what I found:



On Friday late afternoon, into the evening, overnight and into about mid-morning Saturday, it rained. Sometimes torrentially, mostly solidly and rarely, a light drizzle. So we organized ourselves with some tarps:

This last one is where we did our cooking and cleaning for the meals.

All in all we had a good time, the Dads all pitched in whenever something needed doing, mostly with food preparation, but also with tent set up and take down. The kids all had a great time and look forward to this each year.