The Pinery and The Bayfield Bunch!!

Got a little bit of time to catch our breath. Going to catch up the blog this is from Tuesday this past week. 

I will continue on now from yesterday's blog about Pinery Provincial Park. We are here for 2 days, and have a really nice site in the shady woods of the Riverside loop. 

Well, this Pinery Provincial Park sure is a huge place! There are over 800 sites in just the camping areas alone. Scattered among in each of the loops are nice shower buildings with individual shower rooms with locking doors. Also their laundry facilities, and the washer and dryers are $4 each. We are getting low on some of our things but I think we will wait until the next provincial park to catch up on laundry. We had other things to do today.

Many years ago, when I first started reading RV blogs, I stumbled across Al and Kelly with the blog called The Bayfield Bunch.

Here is their blog:

The Bayfield Bunch Blog

They are located in Bayfield Canada, in the Ontario province. They travel most winters down to the southeast desert region of the United States. They actually owned a second winter home for a while in Congress, Arizona. I really admired Kelly's taste in Southwest decorating, as well as her appreciation of art and textiles. Al is a wonderful photographer and has extreme patience and waiting for just the right shot. He has zillions of pictures of wonderful birds, wildlife, and other scenery on his blog. You will have to check it out!

Over the years, we have had many connections together, but never had the chance to actually meet in person! Al and Kelly set us up once with a ranch sitting gig for a week down in Elfrida, Arizona. We helped out some vacant homeowners by staying on their ranch property and keeping it looking occupied. At the same time we had a free place to stay with electric and water and enjoyed the beautiful surrounding desert scenery. Kelly had been there the week before and left a beautiful painted rock to greed us on the front porch. We in turn painted one back for the next time they would be there.

They had helped guide us through various different interesting things to see in the area. We have the same interests, appreciations and likes as far as history, locations, scenery and peaceful relaxing boondocking.

Over the years, we have had so many people in common either visit with them or visit with us. It's like they were old friends we had never met yet.

Well, today was the day to finally meet them in person! 

Truly, Al and Kelly are the ONLY ones that we even made arrangements for to meet up on this entire trip. That's how important it was for us to finally get face to face with them. The Pinery Campground is only about a 20-minute ride from their home in Bayfield, Ontario. 

We made contact each step of the way of our journey, and we were finally within visiting range. They headed on down in their car to visit with us, and of course they brought along Pheebs, their wonder dog!! 

They pulled in, and hugs were immediately exchanged all around. Phoebe got along beautifully with Binney who hid out underneath my chair … as she usually does when people arrive. 

For over 4 hours we exchanged many stories, experiences, laughs, and ideas. They gave us more ideas of things to see in the area, routes to travel, and suggestions of stuff to do during our visit to Ontario.  I sure wish they were camping right next door to us and we could have been sitting around a campfire for the next 3 days. Maybe someday we can do that again.

We brought along a couple little gifts, and they were greatly appreciated with huge smiles. Recently Kelly had been commenting on my Trenary Toast from the UP of Michigan. She was wondering what flavors they came in. So we made sure to stop and get a couple bags of cinnamon and also raisin to bring along into Canada for them.

Many years ago, Al had turned me on to Trader Joe's cookie butter! He said he has been known to walk past a jar and swipe out a finger full just to eat…  and that I just had to try it. It is the consistency of peanut butter but it is made of crushed speculous ginger cookies. No nuts in it. And it's absolutely delicious! After he told us about it, we needed to journey over a hundred miles just to buy some. The nearest Trader Joes to our home in Wisconsin is either down in Milwaukee or over in Madison. Anytime our kids are traveling through those areas, we ask them to stop and pick us up a half a dozen jars. It can be ordered online from sellers on Amazon or eBay but it is extremely expensive. The price is more than doubled. The best way is to buy a directly from Trader Joe's.

So we surprised Al with two new jars. Even though he had said he was swearing off the stuff because it's so addictive. So here we are enabling him again…  

And he doesn't appear to mind one bit.

All too soon, it was time for them to leave. We took our obligatory group photo together with setting my cell phone up on timer. We exchanged hugs all around and said we hope to meet again sometime soon. 

Then we stood and talked some more! 

Then we moved over to the car, and opened the doors and they started getting in, and we stood and talked some more! 

Then once they were in the car with the windows rolled down, and Phoebe in her place, we stood and talked some more!

That is known as the "Midwest Goodbye!!!" Lol

Finally, Al pulled away with Kelly and Pheebs in the car. We stood at the end of our campsite waving with goofy looks on our faces. I think we looked like the Clampetts from the Beverly Hillbillies waving goodbye, like at the end of their shows!

Here is the beautiful blog post that Al wrote about our visit together:

Today-we-met-rv-couple-we-have-known-online-for-a-long-time

After dinner Tuesday evening, we decided to walk on down over near the canal that cuts through the middle of Pinery Provincial Park. There is a protected species of red box turtles that are native to the area and the canal is a place to preserve them. Along the road they even have protective wooden boxes that go over the sandy soil where females have laid eggs. That way nobody steps on the eggs and there are little doorways out of the screened boxes to let the newly hatched baby turtles get out and make their way back into the canal.

As we were standing on the edge of the shore, Steve looked down and saw the most hugest turtle we have ever seen! I am not kidding it was at least two feet long and a foot and a half wide. 

It just laid there in the water, kind of looking up at us. It looked left and right a little bit as some small fish swam past. But it sat there and still stared up at us through the water maybe just 10 feet from the shore. I decided to start videoing it just as it was starting to move around! It kind of pushed it's way through the weeds and eased itself up closer to the fish that were swimming around. I was kind of hoping to see it chomp on a little fish, but that didn't happen.  

Here is a YouTube of what I filmed:

The next day on Wednesday, we were due to leave the park by about 2:00 p.m. but we wanted to drive around and enjoy this humongous park. We drove down along the beach and all the sand dune area. Many many pull-offs for daytime use and picnicers all up and down the beach. We pulled off at one area that had a huge parking lot but it had had a big puddle in the middle. We parked on the back side of it out of the way of the regular beach goers. We were able to make a nice brunch with the windows open listening to the surf and the seagulls. 

We took a walk up over the sand dunes and went along the shoreline for a ways. This is Lake Huron on it's eastern coast on the Canadian side. 

Some creative artistic souls had put together this structure of driftwood on the beach. I hope it remains there for a while. I can just see some crazy person soaking it up with charcoal lighter fluid and setting it aflame! 

Sometimes the littlest things catch my eye to take a picture of. Just random stuff. It helps retain the memory in my head of what it was like to walk up and down on the shore. 

The water is very turquoise blue color. A big contrast from what we're used to with Lake Michigan or Lake Superior. 

Stay tuned for my next blog post heading to Rock Point Provincial Park on Lake Erie.

And while we are gone from home, our kids and neighbors are taking care of the yard, watering flowers and harvesting my tomato plants! Just check out this little stinker who is harvesting all of our tomatoes every few days. 

Now to work on my next blog post. 

No miles traveled today because we stayed here for 2 days. So far on the trip we have traveled 635 miles.