Red Rock Folk Festival

Well plans changed again.  Isn’t that what holidays are for.  Enroute to Thunder Bay we drove past a turnoff for the town of Red Rock, Ontario.  Next to the road was a sign that read “Red Rock Folk Festival Aug 8 – 10”.  I asked Mike the date and it turned out it was August 8.  Of course by this time we have no chance of turning down that road and we cannot make a U turn on the highway with the car in tow.  To make a long story short we decided that a folk festival might be a nice interlude, eventually found somewhere to turn around and drove back.  A large field had been turned into two campsites, one for tents and one for motorhomes.  Everyone just parked right up near everyone else just trying to make room and be friendly.  There was no water or electricity but since we are self-contained for one or two nights that didn’t matter.  This was our first time camping in this type of an environment.  It was fun.  The picture below is the tent area when we arrived.  It continued to fill up for the rest of the night.The festival was great.  During the day they had three tents of music going.  At night they only had the main tent.  Music went until midnight.  After that all the campers gathered at a big bonfire on the edge of Lake Superior.  Lots of the musicians were there, as well as musically inclined campers.  I don’t know how long they stayed until.  I left at 1:30 AM.  Mike never made it to the campfire.   For the festival everyone took their own lounge chairs and just set them up anywhere in front of the stage.  Saturday night is their bigger night and in the past it has averaged over a thousand attendees.  There were some tents for food and crafts.  We were right beside a marina which was nice to see.  The weather was absolutely great: sunny and lovely during the day, a light jacket required late at night and a full moon.  All in all it was a super time.  We stayed for 24 hours which was basically the main concert Friday night and all the daytime stuff on Saturday.  At lunch time we were sitting in our outdoor chairs in front of the stage and they had four of the headlining acts all on stage at once.  They would take turns playing a song and the others would join in and harmonize if they could.  It was all good fun.  It is really great when something completely unplanned and spur of the moment works out so well.  We almost decided to keep driving.  I am very glad we didn’t.

The festival asked that generators be turned off after 10pm.  With no generator and no power we ran the refrigerator, a few small fans and night lights off the batteries.  When Mike went to start the generator in the morning he found out that he couldn’t because there was no charge left in the house batteries.  This had never happened to us before.  All of this is while I am still in bed sleeping.  Mike ran the RV engine for about half an hour and then tried the generator again and it started fine.  Everything in the refrigerator was still very cold so they couldn’t have been off long.

Later that day we stopped in at Kakabeka Falls.  It is a lovely area and we could have camped there.  Given that we hadn’t really been on the road that long we decided to just see the falls and take a short walk.  I now think that was the wrong choice and we should have stayed.  Oh well, hindsight is twenty twenty.

It is now a couple of hours later and we have now been looking for a campsite for a while.  I have just seen a sign for one called Davy Lake.  I am not sure exactly where we are, somewhere between Thunder Bay and Dryden.  If the camp looks at all reasonable we will stay there.  We need to dump our black water for one reason since we didn’t have any facilities at the folk festival.

Addendum:  We are at Davy Lake and it is a nice area.  We are in the town of Ignace, Ontario.  We overlook the small Davy Lake and there is a larger lake and beach within easy walking distance.  I was having boat withdrawal symptoms by the end of July as we hadn’t put our boat in the water this year.  It has just got worse with all these campgrounds in Northern Ontario being on lovely lakes and rivers.