We went to explore some Crown land on Friday night. Crown land is the equivalent of public land in the US, either DNR land or USA land (I can't remember the difference). We knew there was a LOT here, but weren't quite sure where or how to find it as they no longer publish Plat(land ownership) books here. Someone at work told Jeremy there's some just outside of town on the road leading to Algonquin as soon as it turns to a dirt road. Turns out, anything not shaded should be Crown land. I drew a red rectangle around the part we explored. We forgot to time it, but figure it's about 15-20 min from our house and sure enough the paved road turned to dirt/gravel. We brought our Backroads Mapbook with us which is like a WI gazetteer. We're figuring out that there can be a lot of roads shown on the map, but in reality, they may or may not be roads. The double lined roads are major paved roads, but once you look at the single lined roads, that's when you have to be careful. The thinner the line,
the less likely there is a road - or should I say path! Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. This road is a "logging" road recommended for 2wd or 4wd... The map even shows smaller "unclassified" roads for 4wd of which I don't think we saw any even though it showed we passed some. Anyway, it's amazing how quickly you are truely in the boonies around here, although it's amazing how scenic it is and how much water there is. Jeremy's still nervous as we've only seen two ducks so far, but he's been told, they'll come around when the temps start dropping. We're still waiting to see our 1st moose and bear in this area.Saturday we took Hayde back to the Forest Lea Trails just outside the red rectangle on the map. We ran into some people mountain biking
and two pick-ups hauling out fire wood. I didn't think you could drive in there. We managed to find one of the lakes in this area and had a nice walk and even scared up a couple of grouse, which got Hayde all excited. On our way back, we stopped by the boat landing in town to see if there was a fee we'd have to pay to launch the boat. We thought we had seen a sign before, but couldn't find anything regarding a fee so we decided Sunday we could take the boat out for a little bit. In the afternoon, we went to Pembroke to find some wood to build a couple of small tables - two for the living room and two for our bedroom. Jeremy had the idea to build all our furniture out of 2x4's. I finally had given in thinking some things like small tables and a book shelf could be done this way, but that's about it. While we were at the store, he remembered he had a stack of woodworking magazines he had from his dad and got even more excited about building as he looked thru those. I think if he gets into this, we could do some pretty neat stuff (and not all out of 2x4's!) and now have lots of ideas.
Sunday morning we took the boat and Hayde out on the Ottawa River. Turns out the boat landing is free and open to the public! Plus, it's only about 5-10 min away. It was cool, but nice and sunny. We barely made it to the edge of Petawawa. Jeremy's nervous going on on rivers as we have no topographical map yet and don't know where and how drastically the bottom changes. There are lots of islands just off of town. Some people even built on them. I realized, it's real similar to the Chippewa Flowage (one of Jeremy's favorite places) and he decided maybe this place really is pretty nice. We'll just have to figure out the fishing.After returning, we started work on the tables. Jeremy got all the wood cut and pieced, screwed and glued together and I finished sanding one. He has a tool that rounds the corners so we tried it on the top of the table and it turned out really nice. I'm amazed how nice they look. Today, I'll have to try to finish sanding the other two and then we can putty in any holes and get them stained.
I should mention quick that we have excellent recycling. This week is bulk week which we can put almost anything out: mattresses, furniture, computers, radios, large appliances, carpet, etc. The people living here before left us an old computer monitor, so thankfully I can get that out. I wasn't sure what we were going to do with that! Also, we have weekly or bi-weekly recycling for any compost & yard waste, paper & cardboard, and another for containers. I've got the list of what goes where on the fridge as it's hard to remember what goes where. A couple times a year they do the bulk pick-up which is great so you don't have to try to figure out what to do with these things.
One last thing before I post. Below is a link to our explorations we have that I'll continuously be updating so keep checking this link:
Explorations
http://good-times.webshots.com/album/566983077dmpAuo
And below is a link to our house pictures. I'll do any updates only when we change anything - once we build the rest of our furniture...
House
http://good-times.webshots.com/album/566621953qNjgMF
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