5 months in advance

Our family loves to camp. 

Both Tim and I grew up camping with our respecitive families every summer.  My parents liked to try new campgrounds out every year.  There were some amazing places and some real duds.  We travelled throughout Ontario and down into the United States too.  My all time favourite memory of family camping was being in Maryland and camping on Assateague Island.  We camped among wild horses!!  It was very cool and we hope to take our girls there one day.

Tim's family usually camped at Killbear Provincial Park with three or four other families.  They all camped in a row at side-by-side sites facing the beach.  They would set up and not leave for weeks.  Tim would roam the beach and the campground with his friends. 

So now it's five months until July.  Ontario Parks won't let you book earlier than 5 months from your arrival date.  Each year around this time in the winter we start thinking about our summer vacation.  Where will we go?  Which week should we pick?  We love Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron and Killbear Provincial park on Georgian Bay.  Tim proposed to me at Killbear so it has sweet memories for us.  We camped at Killbear last summer and it is now our families first choice for campgrounds.

Reserving a campsite isn't for the weak, my friends.  Unless you are a one-tent family and don't care about electiricity.  Fortunately for us we have the use of a trailer every year which requires an electrical site.  I love having a freezer while camping because I bring all of my dinners prepared from home and just heat them up and add some fresh vegetables. 

To many of you this isn't "real" camping.  But being comfortable, dry, and well-fed makes for a great vacation for us and so this is our definition of camping.  Don't knock it till you try it.  :)

Anyways, so you need to be well-prepared to reserve a site.  There aren't that many electrical, large sites at Killbear.  They are hard to get.  I am on the computer early...watching the computer time to change from 6:59:59 to 7:00:00.  And "click"  ..I try to reserve the one available site five months from today...and within 1 second I know that someone else got it ..grrr... and now I need to wait again until tomorrow.

Honestly, I hate this part of camping.  It shouldn't be so hard to reserve a site but I guess there are many many out there that love it just as much as we do.

I'll be back on the ontarioparks.com site bright and early tomorrow morning.

Here's to attempt #2.