Today is my first whole day back in T-dot (Toronto) after a weekend at Algonquin Park. It was amazing! 11 of us went (Team Exchange + Andrea from Canada) and stayed at this log cabin lodge in the middle of nowhere. There was no electricity, no hot water and no phone reception. The lodge was right next to Lake Surprise, which was completely frozen and covered with snow. In the lake were several small foresty islands. The area was not completely flat but not very mountainous either. And the sun was shining every day! We had the best weather, it was nice and warm (around 5C I think) so we could do a lot of stuff outside without freezing.
The first night we arrived it was already dark. Our guide Kris showed us around the cabin and we put our stuff in our rooms. Then after that we had the most amazing dinner I've had in a while, which was followed by all of us sitting in front of the open fire with a lot of whine, beer, malibu and bailey's and listening to Tim's guitar skills and the battery-worked (I'm making up words on the spot here, but you know what I mean) stereo.
The next day we went cross-country skiing. It's so hard! I thought that because I already knew how to ski downhill, I would easily be able to do the cross-country skiing... How very wrong I was! I fell so many times I haven't even bothered to count it any more. Every downhill slope I just lost complete control of my skis and landed face down in a pile of snow. Running into trees was also very common.. And it's so hard to get up once you've fallen down!! Uphill you have to put your skis in a V-shape and walk up, which proved pretty hard as well. Haroon especially was having problems with this one hill, and got pretty stressed after the people who were already up there started to take pictures! When we finally got up the hill we used a toboggan to sled downhill again. It's just so scary with the trees all around you! But it was great fun. At the end of the afternoon we returned and had a sauna before dinner. The sauna just fitted all of us in, and was pitch dark. And after getting too hot, we would all run outside, roll in the snow and run back into the sauna screaming like crazy! After the sauna we all went inside to have dinner, which once again was very delicious. And in the evening all of us would sit in front of the fire place again in the most comfortable couches you can imagine. Two of the guides, Abby and James, took us outside to see if there were any Northern lights, but unfortunately we didn't see any. Then we howled at the wolves that are supposed to be in the park, but didn't get any response. Abby played some guitar for us that night, and she was really good. That night, Jess, Andrea and I decided to sleep in the quincy (igloo-sort-of-thing) outside. So we got some mats and sleeping bags and crawled through the tiny little tunnel and spent the night in there. The only thing you could see once you switched off the torch was the darkblue airhole that we made so we wouldn't suffocate. In the middle of the night Jess woke up because she dreamed that the entire quincy had collapsed on top of us, but for the rest it was actually a pretty peaceful night. The next morning everything was soaking wet though, and we were pretty cold. But we were very proud of ourselves! :) Especially with the bears walking around in the park. They're supposed to be hibernating around this time, but you never know. Abby told us that there had been two fatal incidents with bears in the park: one older couple and three young boys. She also told us about this Japanese couple in British Columbia (in the West of Canada) wanted to take a picture of their baby with a bear. They wanted the bear to kiss the baby, so they put peanut butter on its head and then left the baby there. Eventually they ended up with a picture of how the bear ate their kid. I mean, how stupid can you be?
Anyway, the next day Jess, Andrea and I returned to the cabin to have breakfast, after which we got dressed to go snowshoeing. Snowshoes are these big wooden kind of tennis rackets that you bind underneath your boots so that you don't sink to deep into the snow. We snowshoed over the lake to the shore on the other side, where we collected wood for a fire. We also drilled a hole in the ice to get some water for hot apple cider and to try some icefishing. Of course, we didn't catch anything. But we did use the fire to warm up some sausages for hot dogs. There was also a quincy on that side of the lake, which Tim and Ben decided to explore. Strangely enough, they found pubic hairs in it! I swear, what is it with Canadians and pubic hair? But yeah, after lunch we walked back, played a game with the imaginary ball of fun (don't ask), and had a sauna again. And after dinner we sat on our beloved couches again. I didn't go to bed that late, because the next morning we had to wake up at 6:45 AM to go dogsledding.