“Honey I’m hoooo-,” “READY!?” I asked. “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff,” Marco responded, looking around at the mess that I had proudly made. I had carefully upended the camping bucket on the floor of the apartment and sorted the mess into smaller piles of mess. “I think this is everything we wanted?” I asked with a smile. Marco smiled at me. After another hour we had packed up our bags and our dinner eaten. The night before we had done the long drive (4 hours of driving!) to and from Fundy National Park; we dropped off one car at the end of the trail so that we could get back. The national park allowed us to register for the trail and park our car for the duration of our walk. They did not charge us anything as we had a park pass for the year (highly recommended if you’re a fellow outdoor enthusiast). There is a small fee for parking your vehicle otherwise. It was relatively painless, minus the driving to and from the park. It’s around a 2 hour drive between the two points, so it can be a bit of a long day to drop one car off. We looked into getting shuttles, but it seems that it was only worth if it you pack the shuttle (5-6 people), otherwise it was around $400 for us to take the shuttle. With our bags packed and ready, we headed off towards the Fundy Trails Park in St. Martin’s. We arrived at the gates an hour before they close (08:00 - 20:00, summer hours). We were registered for the path, our numbers were taken, an emergency contact provided, and our expected end date for the trail was recorded. We parked our car in P8 and prepared for getting on trail. The trail starts at the suspension bridge just behind the visitors’ centre/ interpretation centre. From there you have to keep an eye out for the white blazes around to follow. “This way?” I ask. “Nope,” Marco answered. Clearly I was not any good at finding these white blazes. Apparently I needed to get my trail eyes as well as my trail legs. Well, it’s a good thing that I had four days of practice ahead of me! Soon I started to remember the path that we had taken the weekend previously (see Fundy Test Hike). We walked along, picked more raspberries from the path, and finally found the camp site around 2 kms down the path. It was around 20:45 by the time that we set up camp. “Let’s set up the tent here?” I suggested. There was a beautiful view of the water, which would be nice to wake up to. We had decided to do the short hike because there was no way to access the trail before 08:00 otherwise. Once we had the tent set up the way we like and the sleeping bags/mats all set up, we started to look for a good bear hang for our food. Two people and four days worth of food equalled around 11.5 lbs of food. We also hang our cooking system and our hygiene kit - so it’s a pretty heavy bag. We took one look around at the trees, “Ummmmm…” Marco seemed to be in deep thought. “Er…..” I expressed. “Yeah…” Marco responded. The trees were all soft wood, with spindly arms, and very close together. In order to get a good bear hang you need a branch that is not close to anything else: other branches, the ground, etc. It was starting to get dark. We needed to find a bear hang, quickly. We thought we saw a good branch to throw the rope. Marco grabbed a rock, tied the rope around the rock, got a good swing, and threw the rope over the branch. Success! Wait, rope, no! No! Don’t keep swinging! Stop! Oh no! Now the rope was knotted around itself, around 15 feet off the ground. Huh. Well camping is always full of problem solving, right? After a moment of staring at the rope, trying to move it with our minds, Marco tried to climb the tree to try to grab the rock. However, this was not successful. We ended up having to use our hiking poles, extended as far that they would go, to get the rock to untangle itself. With a good 30 minutes wasted on trying to get the rope to work on that tree, we gave up. Time to look for a new tree. “Are you ok to stay here with the food?” Marco asked. “It’s heavy and it doesn’t make sense to drag it around the forest looking for a branch.” “Yup,” I responded while clicking on my head lamp. It was firmly night now. Marco walked off into the darkness, looking for a tree. All of a sudden, I was alone, in the woods, at night. The darkness started to press in, in the only way it can when you’re in the middle of the forest. The wide open forest, all of the sudden, closes in. Your mind starts to wander about all of the scary things that the forest holds: bears, trolls, moose, ghosts, etc. The forest has a way of worming into your mind and teasing out your worst fears. All of the sudden you’re vulnerable, and all of the things you’re scared of start to come alive. I start to sing an old camp song that still easily comes to my mind whenever I’m nervous. I wear my pink pyjamas in the summer when it’s hot I wear my flannel nighties in the winter when it’s not And sometimes in the springtime and sometimes in the fall I jump into my little bed with nothing on at all Oh that’s the time you ought to see me That’s the time you ought to see me That’s the time you ought to see me, when I jump into my little bed with nothing on at all Nosey, nosey what’s it to yeah? Nosey, nosey what’s it to yeah? Nosey, nosety what’s it to yeah? When I jump into my little bed with nothing on at all! Hey! I think us kids must have changed the lyrics at some point because when I google the actual lyrics, they’re a heck of a lot cleaner. For better or worse though, this is the song that gets stuck in my head when I’m nervous about anything. It’s super annoying and won’t leave my head for days. This was going to be a long hike. Marco must have heard my singing because he shouted out “EVERYTHING OK OVER THERE?” “YEAH!” I shouted back. He walked back and told me the bad news: there didn’t seem to be a good tree to hang our food on. We looked at each other (as much as you can with headlamps on) and a realisation passed between us: we were about to embark on a night hike. Marco and I had been jokingly saying that we were going to do a night hike tonight. Well, you ask and the universe provides, so here we go! We packed the tent back up. I said a good-bye to my bed, packed it all away, and we put our food back in our packs. We took out our hiking poles, to make sure that we weren’t going to slip on anything in the night, turned on our headlamps, and started off towards the next camp site on our map: Long Beach, another 4 kms away. “AH!” I screamed. “WHAT?!” Marco responded. “What is that?!” “What?” “That?” “Where?” “Over there!” “....the tree?” “The….oh. Yeah the tree.” Hiking during the night made all of the shadows look like animals of their own. I remembered a story that Marco was telling me about - a cougar was thought to be found in New Brunswick. There was a debate going on about whether there were actual cougars around. [link] Not to mention, I also don’t like bears all that much either - so everything looked suspicious in the dark. The trail itself is well marked and easy to find, so we didn’t have too much trouble following it all the way to Long Beach. Along the way we saw some neat small creatures (bugs, frogs, you know, the friendly animals). Soon we were making our way down the side of the hill and saw Long Beach ahead of us. We were excited to get down to the site, find a bear hang, and get to sleep. As soon as we got down to the site we noticed a parking lot, an interpretation centre, and that was about it! Where were the camp sites that were promised on the map? Did we have an old map? We could always find a bear hang and sleep on the grass in front of the interpretation centre, and we’d be ok. We took an expectant look around us, trying to find a tree that could be a bear hang. It was around midnight at this point, and we were both quite tired. The same spindly, close hugging trees seemed to surround the site. We cursed silently and tried to weigh our options. The next campsite we were going to be staying at was another 10kms or so from our current spot. I was too tired to hike until the morning. That’s when I noticed that the interpretation centre had bathrooms. “Hmmmm,” I pondered aloud. “Hmmm?” Marco questioned. “Well, the bathroom doors have handles. Those would be hard for animals to get into. We could put our food in there for the night. It’s not like anyone’s going to be using the bathrooms. The park is closed,” I suggested. We walked into the ladies bathroom and found a hook on the back of a change room to hang our food. With that sorted we turned our thoughts to setting up camp. “Hmmmm,” I pondered aloud. “Hmmm?” Marco questioned. “Well, instead of being tired and setting up the tent, and getting it wet [there was due on the ground], we could just sleep in the bathroom,” I suggested. “Is it….clean in here?” Marco asked, incredulous. “The ground is cement. They must wash it down once a day; besides, we’d be sleeping on our sleeping mats.” “...maybe.” I was convincing him! Success! In the end our exhaustion won, and we ended up setting up camp in the women’s bathroom at Long Beach. We set our alarm for the sunrise the next morning and settled into blissful sleep.
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