O is for… Ontario the Beautiful

 

O is also for outside.  My favourite place within Ontario to be outdoors is Algonquin Park. I have camped there several times. Each time was wonderful and quite memorable. My first time visiting the park when I saw how awe inspiring a place it was my immediate reaction was THIS is the place that all those lovely postcards of Ontario are taken from!  I always thought it was lovely view to the front, snap – there’s a postcard, and directly behind you an industrial wasteland, or at best farmers fields. To discover a real place where the views are like this 360 blew me away.

When I was giving birth to my first daughter, late in the birth when the contractions were horrible waves to ride through, the doula told me to focus on my happy place.  This is what I was focusing on, my memories of Algonquin; cool breeze,the scent of pine,  tall tall trees, a pair of mated loons calling out over the lake, wolves howling, red autumn leaves glowing in the sunshine.

Now here is where I should be inserting all of my awesome camping pics, but I don’t have them.  They were stored on my external harddrive, which recently fried.  Lesson learned. Back up the back up.  Thankfully I didn’t lose all the photos of my girls, as the majority of them are online.

I do however have some photos, from my very last camping trip to Algonquin on which I managed to drag my sister along. She brought her manual camera and took tons of gorgeous shots.  So there’s something to say for manual over digital. Besides my sister is a much better photographer then I am.  I’m sad that I lost all of the pictures from previous years, but pleased that I still have these original hardcopies. And now writing this post has prompted me to scan them in and post them online. Doubly saved!

Me, in my Happy Place.

Postcards taken from my mom’s collection, and photography courtesy of Holly Pageau.