OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES
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"Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong."
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~George Carlin
LINKS
Camping in the Canadian Wilderness
Each summer a family friend and me go on a week long canoe trip into the wilderness of Canada either at Algonquin Provincial park located in the middle of Ontario, or in Killarney Provincial Park located in northern Ontario. Each park is secluded and designated to the preservation of the wild outdoors. The lakes are very clean because motorboats have been banned within the parks so the water is not contaminated by the oil from boat engines. The only way to enter into the parks is via canoe and you must be able to carry everything you take with you because there are many portages between the different lakes that requires you to get out of the canoe and carry everything you brought including the canoe itself over the land to the next lake. While camping in make shift campsites for a week we cover a lot of distance usually only staying on a lake for one night before moving on to the next lake. So it is very physically demanding to be able to travel 10-20 km every day by canoe plus portages and then set up camp each night. Overall, these trips attest to how much I love the outdoors and I would recommend that everyone try it out.
For class we have had some out of doors activities. One of them was geocaching at Tanglewood Nature Center. We split into two different groups and each tried to find two geocaches. Trying to find them was an adventure all in itself, then when you add four other people in your group all trying to find the same thing you are it almost turns into chaos; but fun chaos. Our group consisted of Renaldo, Claudette, Cassie, Jamie, and I. We were able to find one of the two geocaches that we were assigned to try to find, it was called entangled. However, by the time we had gotten to the other one, it was time for us to leave so we were unable to locate it. Despite only finding one of our assigned geocaches we all had a lot of fun getting lost with a GPS system and made memories that will probably never be forgotten, such as running up the side of a mountain with the thought that the faster we got up the side of it the sooner it would be over.
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The second activity that we have done as a class was hiking at Watkins Glen state park. There are waterfalls and caverns for people to look at as they walk through. Unfortunately that day we were unable to go all the way through the trail but it was still fun. We took some other trails and ended up in a cemetery, which was unexpected but interesting. Our outdoor activities have shown to be times for our class to bond since some of us have different opinions on why people play sports. Getting to show that it is good for people to take part in some sort of physical activity on a regular basis was probably a good thing for our class.
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