Today we are going to share with you our top 5 Ontario Provincial Parks.
There are 340 provincial parks in Ontario and 85 of those are for car camping. Now car camping is
the type of camping that we do, the type of videos you see us do, where you drive into your site and
you park your RV or you pitch your tent. That's car camping. All the other ones would be fly in,
train in or paddle in, interior type camping. So we're only going to be talking about the car
camping type and of those 85 car camping we've been to probably about 20 of them
but this video is going to be our top five based on the last two years in which we've
been doing reviews of Provincial Parks. So without further ado, number five.
Number five is arrowhead.
And we loved arrowhead. We went there in 2019. I's a nice sized park.
It has some really nice trails, some nice beaches, a really nice dog beach, good for watercraft.
The kayak to Stubbs Falls. Yeah Stubbs Falls there's a really nice hike to Stubbs Falls or you
can canoe or kayak down the river to get there. Now there's no way you're going to be actually
kayaking or canoeing over Stubbs Falls, It's a very steep falls but it's a nice destination where
a lot of people get out and enjoy the falls and very photogenic, very scenic. As well they have
nice large private campsites. It's just outside of Huntsville so it's very close to Huntsville if
you forgot anything. If you need anything you can run into town. Huntsville has everything
that you need, Walmart, grocery stores. They have five beaches. One of them is a dog exercise area.
They have nice trails for hiking and biking. It just seems like an all-around nice
family campground, older old-fashioned campground. Yeah,
great so that's Arrowhead. So now we move on to number four and number four is...
Restoule
Restoule went to just this past summer yeah yeah uh it's not too far from Arrowhead. It's
just a little farther north of Arrowhead on Highway 11 and it is a really nice park too.
It has two lakes; Restoule Lake and Stormy Lake with a river connecting them
and as you know we like to do our water sports. We have our kayaks and stand-up paddleboard and we
really like spending time in the water doing that so these two lakes are really nice size for doing
that and provides some pretty nice scenery. Don't have any big waves that you have to fight against.
Right, it's scenic paddle boarding, kayaking canoeing etc. Yeah the waterfront sites are very
nice so you can keep your uh your uh kayaks canoes paddleboards right there at your site and just go
out from there and you can even swim from your site. Nice sandy bottom. There's three beaches
and a pet exercise area where the dogs can run in the water. That's also a real nice thing.
Campsites; the sites closest to the water, the first three rows are a little bit cramped
but once you get further away from there you get really nice big sites and a lot of privacy.
Hiking; good for hiking and biking. Nice trails Fire the Fire Tower Trail Fire Tower Trail it's
one of the nicest hikes we've ever been on. Yeah, it starts off in a pine forest with tall pines
and moves through different types of forests. It's really interesting how in one area
you get multiple types of terrain on this one hike and then, vegetation i guess yeah the word
i'm looking for vegetation. Yeah yeah and it culminates in the lookout at the Fire Trail.
Yeah and there's the uh tower it's the Fire Tower Trail right is that what we said? I don't know. I
don't know. The Fire Tower so the fire tower is still there. It's decommissioned but it's kind
of cool to see. Uh you can see it from stormy lake when you're kayaking through there and you
get right up to it uh when you're hiking the trail and then you go to the lookout over Stormy Lake
and it is a beautiful lookout. It's nice to spend some time there. Number three...
Charleston Lake
First time there this past summer. We really enjoyed it. Um one thing that really stood out
for me about Charleston Lake are the sites. The sites were huge. I loved how big the sites were
and then what's really nice about Charleston Lake are the water sports. The area around the beaches
and the canoe launch, no motor boats are allowed in that area but once you go out a little ways
there's some bouys there and motorboats are permitted there. There is also a boat launch if
you have a power boat you can put in there but if you're swimming and doing your kayaking and
paddle boarding you don't want to be around the power boats you've got a huge area of the lake
that you can do that. There's a lot of interior camping at Charleston Lake and because of that
there's really nice canoe and kayak routes. Takes you down into Slim Bay. You can stop off,
check out some of those uh campsites. Yeah it's uh really nice. Lots of islands to go around.
We popped out explored a few spots. One of the trails that we didn't do, which is supposed to be
a really nice trail along a ridge um you actually have to paddle to get to it. We didn't go do that
trail. When we go back next time and we will go back uh we'll end up doing that trail because
I'm told that was the nicest trail there. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to do it.
Charleston Lake had several other hikes that we did do. They were very nice and very scenic.
Fireflies, fireflies. Yes fireflies. Never seen anything like that at an Ontario Provincial Park.
At night in the forest you see the flickering lights all through it. The only time I've ever
seen that before is when we're in Kentucky but uh yeah i have a little bit of footage of
that at Charleston Lake. The fireflies were really really nice. I don't know if it's just that time
of year, if it was unusual or not but when we were there it was just beautiful seeing those fireflies
and there were a lot of them. Okay, moving on, numero dos, number two...
Pinery.
Pinery, our old standby. We've been going to Pinery for 30 years. It's close to home for
us so and it's on Lake Huron. Lake Huron, you can't beat the sunsets. That's the best place
we find. Yeah any of those parks along Lake Huron; Pinery, MacGregor Point, Point Farms, Inverhuron,
greatest sunsets ever. Pinery is one of the larger parks again has over a thousand campsites. 10
kilometers sandy beaches. Yeah, so all you have to do is walk west from any site and you're going to
be on a beautiful sandy beach. They have a nice visitor center, restaurant, store, ice cream and
the Old Ausable Channel for your water sports, such as kayaking, canoeing, paddle board. No
motorized boats though. Yeah I wouldn't do most of the water sports in Lake Huron, it's a big lake
it can get pretty choppy and there's really not much to see there. It's just a big shoreline, but
you go down the Old Ausable Channel and you can see different types of birds, turkeys, um lots of
turtles sunning themselves. Good hiking. But yeah, Pinery uh love that park. That's why we keep on
going back year after year. It's a big really nice park. But now we've made it to our number one...
Algonquin Park.
Of all the parks we've ever been to and we're talking in Ontario and in the states
of all the parks you've ever been to in my book and I probably can talk for you in your book.
Algonquin is the nicest park we've ever been to. Now granted, it's a little different from
all the other parks because it's massive, something like 7 000 square kilometers.
Not a park you can do in one trip. Right, we used to go into Algonquin Park when we used to
do interior camping on canoe trips. That was a thing we used to do. Now we're a little older,
we like yeah we like our travel trailer and now we're parking at the organized campsites along
highway 60 in Algonquin Park and there's something like 9 10 or 11 or whatever organized campsites
along highway 60. We've stayed at Canisbay and most recently Pog Lake we've been going to the
past few years. Yeah, I love Canisbay too but we've kind of settled on Pog we've been going to
for the last few years. Mostly because we like the one area in Pog that has uh a lot of waterfront
sites and beautiful views uh and uh not a bad sunset from there too. In Algonquin we've got
many many hiking trails you have to drive to get to them to start and they're like a kilometer
and a half up to 38 kilometers. So they got something for everybody and those hiking trails,
many of them have beautiful lookouts where you get to a very high elevation and you can overlook a
huge area. It's really nice good payoffs on those hikes. What else do we like? Two outposts, yeah,
visitor center, large huge visitor center. Best visitor center we've ever been to. It really tells
you about the history uh and the landscape of the park. Along with that there's the logging museum.
It's got a self-guided trail, three kilometers, yep three kilometers through the woods. I really
enjoy doing that. Yeah, actually you learn a lot about Algonquin Park. Most people see Algonquin
Park is just the place they go camping in but they are actively logging Algonquin Park and they have
for centuries. So it's very interesting learning about that at the logging museum. And there's
an art gallery as well yeah we've been to the art gallery once. Across kind of across from Canisbay
near the beginning of Algonquin. So when you stay at one of the places like Pog lake you can go to
any of the other campgrounds there because your pass is for Algonquin Park so you can go anywhere
there. So some of the other parks or some of the other campgrounds have trails from them like uh
when we bike from Pog to Lake of Two Rivers. Oh yeah, that's a beautiful trail. The old rail trail
yeah. It's where we saw our first bear right in the mom and baby, right close to the blueberry
patch. There's a huge field of blueberries, so the bears go there and they eat the blueberries.
That's where you go to uh the store there's a little store, Lake of Two Rivers store
it's got a little restaurant and um store where you can buy camping things and get ice cream.
And usually when you're doing the drive to any of these hikes to the the store and the museums and
stuff, you want to keep your eyes open for moose and we've seen a moose a few times at the side
of the road usually you'll know when there's a moose because everybody's pulled over there
and they're all trying to take pictures of the moose. You just need to keep your distance because
they are huge. If you've never seen a moose in real life you'll be shocked at how big they
are they are huge and they can be dangerous so you need to stand back give them their space.
So Algonquin you can't do it all in one trip unless you're there for the entire summer maybe
but if you're there for a week, you can't do it all. There's a lot of things you can do,
it just means you need to come back again and you can try the other parks. Like I said we've done
Canisbay and Pog. Some friends of ours have done Lake of Two Rivers and Mew Lake. They loved that.
Actually Mew Lake is the only campground I believe that's open during the winter. It's got the yurts
so if you're into winter camping that's the spot to go. And we're gonna keep on
going back to Pog Lake year after year. We'll see. No well maybe not Pog Lake but we'll try
some other other campgrounds. We have a lot of Provincial Parks to cover. Yeah, and so that's
what we're doing now. We're trying to make sure we can do more provincial parks not just keep on
going back to the same ones, which we've done for years, but since we've started doing reviews on
this channel we've made a real concerted effort to go to different provincial parks and explore them
and it's worked out pretty well for us because we found some real gems. Most of these Parks
that we've mentioned today, we hadn't been to before. Arrowhead, Restoule, Charleston Lake
we'd never been there before. Just in the last two years while doing reviews is when we first
went to them and they made it into our top five. So we're gonna continue to explore uh a lot more
Provincial Parks. Season three is coming up and uh we hope to get you know, seven, eight, nine,
parks in. We like to spend at least three or four days there. There's so many nice Provincial Parks,
um there's ones that we haven't listed that are still excellent to go to but we picked these top
five and yours might be very different, it depends what you like to do, what you're looking for
right now. If you have any suggestions for a park that we should go to,
please let us know in the comments. We're now making our plans for this summer and
if you think there's an exceptionally good park, let us know because we want to go there
and we want to do a review of it. That's it, we'll see you at the next campground.
Bye