I woke up at 6:30, had a nice poop in a real bathroom… and foolishly went back to sleep. Around 9:30 hungover Steve managed to pull himself upright. We’d lost the chance to paddle the rest of the lake in calm, glassy conditions BUT we did get treated to bacon, eggs, and pancakes at the park’s opening weekend buffet breakfast. There was also a puppy present, which was icing on the cake for me. Seriously, NICEST. PEOPLE. EVER. They even waved us off from shore and made us feel super cool and hardcore.
Not that feeling hardcore made any difference, because the rest of the day was a bit of a slog. We set out aiming to end at Mactaquac Dam so we wouldn’t have to portage it midday.
We spent most of the day crawling down the lake in a headwind JUST stiff enough that if we stopped paddling, we immediately started moving backwards… at a rate about the same as our forward pace. It was also another fun-filled day of “where the hell are we, damn these flood conditions and damn this weird Canadian map”, although we did pass a quaint little place called King’s Landing that spawned a few hours’ worth of nerd jokes.
Once we saw the dam, we still had to find the pullout… and do a full lake crossing in gnarly tail winds and good-sized waves. And impending rain, because why not. We ended up pulling over so Steve could jog up and scout it out, and good thing- we would have missed it completely. We set up for the night at a dodgy pullout RIGHT at the dam in the company of some pissed-off beavers, and just barely got set up before it started dumping rain.