Day 2 of 3 – Keep everything dry with Ziploc bags (except the one roll of toilet paper)

I am not a fan of the shitboxes* Parks Ontario has installed in all their campgrounds and I have written about this before. Needless to say, I expected the bathroom aspects of this two-night, three-day camping trip to be the same as the previous one, so all the toilet paper-related details were the responsibility of my co-campers. I figured that I could simply borrow a couple squares if things got necessary.

Well, I was expecting a shutdown and my body… my body had other ideas.

Specifically, on this trip instead of shutting down, my system was behaving more like a Star Destroyer going to light speed – saving on fuel by dumping excess garbage. My system knew I was going hiking for three days and my body was going to have to carry everything itself so it decided to make things as light as possible.

So by 21:00 on the first night I had to go. If I’m uncomfortable with these things in the daylight then I’m terrified of them after nightfall. And for some reason the dude who designed our campsite put it within eyesight (and earshot) of the tent platform.

A million square miles of forest and you have to put it ten metres from the tent. Thanks for that, buddy.

For you hiker / campers that’s campsite H1 – Killarney Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada. Send your feedback here http://www.ontarioparks.com/contact/email – the letter-writing campaign starts now!

From what I can tell, I survived that experience intact but the second night’s campsite WC was even worse. It looked like an animal had dug its way underneath. Eventually nature came a-callin’ and I had to use it – during the day. Which was lucky for me cause one of my co-hikers (I cannot say which one) had to go after dark and when he got out there his headlamp illuminated two giant yellow eyes.

Pretty terrifying, eh?

I frantically tried to connect to the Internet to find out (based on the available information) what it was. But there was no signal. Using our brains we narrowed down the list of candidate animals to a lean dozen – a bear, a deer, a mountain lion, the Sasquatch, a wild boar, the Chupacabra, the Vampire Lestat, the abominable snowman, Godzilla, a moose, an elk, manbearpig.

I happened to have been minding the campfire working at my computer with the Photo Booth application running and I captured a single image from my webcam the exact moment I heard his cries.

We then looked around for 20 minutes for a backup toilet but could not find one.

I went over to investigate but saw nothing. Also earlier in the evening we had noticed tonnes of bear shit all over the place when we were collecting firewood. Who knew the forrest cold be so scary? When the others had all gone to bed I was left to tend the fire all by myself. And I almost died of fear.

* They are not outhouses. Outhouses ensure privacy with a door and a roof. These things have but a lid and zero privacy.