This Week In Camping

Welcome to another exciting Tuesday! Well, exciting for me anyway; I'm pretty wound up to go camping this weekend! For those of you who haven't already been informed, I'm heading up to Killarney with Dad, Gray, and Jay on Friday. We're staying in town for the evening and then heading into the park on Saturday for some camping. We're departing from our usual approach by leaving the kayaks at come and opting for some rented canoes. It could be quite the adventure getting off the beach, since in this group only Dad has any canoeing experience. I'm quite confident that we'll be able to get the hang of it though. Dad's pretty keen on not having to load the kayaks by himself before meeting us up here, and there should be some advantages to the canoes for this particular trip. While a kayak is generally much better if the weather turns foul, and probably the vessel of choice if you're on your own, a canoe has a LOT more open space for gear. When we kayak everything ends up in small dry bag bundles to fit in the small holds. This makes it a nightmare for unloading the boats when you need to portage. With the canoes we can load all of our gear into boundary bags (think a huge dry bag with a backpack-style harness on it) so that when we hit a portage we just throw our gear on our backs, grab our canoes, and walk. I'm picturing the portages being a lot less annoying than previous they have been on previous excursions.

Speaking of camping, I've been directed to another great camping opportunity! A friend of mine recently returned from a two-year stay in Australia. He successfully avoided running afoul of Australia's legion of poisonous snakes, spiders, rocks, mammals, etc. and returned to tell the tale. And his favorite destination in Australia? Tasmania, giving a big eff yu to mainland Australia. I kid. Anyway, he really did love Tasmania for it's pristine wilderness and abundance of wildlife. Obviously this has piqued my interest. He'd mentioned that one of the things to do in Tasmania is to walk the Overland Track, a 6-day journey through the Tasmanian countryside. If you check out this website I think you'll see why I've become quite enamored of the idea: http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.aspx?base=7771

Apparently the Track has become quite the popular destination, but they're doing their best to manage the flow of people and keep the crowds down. Still, given their description of the weather I don't think that the off-season could throw anything at me that a good hearty Canadian lad couldn't handle. I hate crowds when I'm trying to enjoy the great outdoors. Actually, scratch the postfix there; I hate crowds. I'll do just about anything to avoid them. That includes braving a risk of snow.

My next trick will be to attempt a few long-distance hiking/camping trips around here to ensure that I'm up to the challenge. I may find that I'm not as keen on camping when I don't have a boat handy to carry all my gear for me. Fortunately this area abounds with opportunities to test myself, and I intend to do so at my nearest convenience. After that I need only face the challenge of trying to find some friends who are willing to fly half way around the world to exciting Tasmania for the privilege of sleeping on their dirt. Wish me luck with that one.