4 Day Adventure with my Wife | Algonquin Park Opeongo - Proulx Lake | Budget Meal Ideas

Kaya, where'd you get that bone? Weld mint he found. Dina! That'll be enough to add some flavor. Here's our meal, pasta primavera with some buns. It's like I've never swam before in my life. All right so the wind and the rain upgraded a little bit. Well we finally made it to Lake Opiango and we just set sail. There it is over there. We got Dina here. We got Kaya here. She's a windy one today. Probably canoed for about half an hour. Got to this little island here. It's very windy but it's a beautiful day. We're just having chicken wraps, chicken, onions, green peppers. It's actually just the first island that you can see when you get from the uh the puddin but we're still pretty far south. We got to go way way maybe five hour paddle down there just because it's very windy. Well we didn't have lunch today and we just had a quick breakfast so this is good little fuel. Look at this bad boy. Kaya, no. That is huge for scale. Got a thorn on his butt. Need some help buddy? There you go. Oi captain, where are we going? Well I'm trying to read this map and I don't know how so I actually need you to tell me where we are. There's a sleepy girl. Oh she's a little windy now. We got a guy blasting this way. All right I gotta paddle. I can't hold this GoPro no more. One-handed. All right so we started around, well we started right there. We paddled all the way up. We want, can you see, we wanted to stop off at these islands here. They're all taken so we're gonna hopefully go for this one right here. It's taken us about two and a half hours maybe so not too bad considering we're against the wind. This is the one island there. Everyone here has motor boats though. We're the only one on a canoe. We haven't seen anyone on a canoe since we left the southern arm. Come on Kaya. It's like I can't even swim. It's like I've never swam before in my life. That's how noodley my arms are. Also these shoes are weighing me down. What kind of concoction do you got? It's just a very fancy hot dog wrap. Nice. Yes. Hot dog ketchup in a wrap. Let's see the inside of that deliciousness. It's a spider dog. Baby. Nice. So Dina cut up all the veg. She's cutting up some more now. Got some mushrooms. Mushrooms now. So we're gonna have mushrooms for breakfast tomorrow. And we got peppers and onions and I put some Cajun and roasted garlic seasoning on there. We're gonna pair that with this falafel mixture that we got. So we're gonna deep fry it in this and have it with this rice in a wrap. This campsite is beautiful. Here's our tent. I'm gonna open up the back flap so that when we wake up we can go look out and see the lake. Here's our brand spanking new canoe. This is a 16 foot canoe. It's uh 54 pounds which is much lighter than all the other canoes that I've portaged before. So for being 16 feet it's pretty big but it fits Dina, me, Kaya and all of our gear really well. There's actually like enough room for another person almost but it's fairly easy to portage. The only thing about it is that it is 16 feet so it gets kind of like awkwardly top heavy but no it's pretty good. A friend of a friend of ours built it and he sold it to me for a little bit of a decent deal so we got a canoe. I want to get into longer longer trips so I did the five days but I want to like I want to do longer. I'd love to do like over 10 days just to kind of like push myself. I don't know I think all that stuff is kind of fun and I really want to push myself in terms of the food I bring so I want to bring less food and hopefully live off the land because I'm really getting into wild edibles. I actually found a lot here that we can eat so we're going to be looking into some of that. I saw a lot of blueberry bushes but no blueberries on it but if you stay tuned I will show you some wild edibles that I did find. So we got the falafel mix in here. I'm just adding a little bit of flour and baking soda to it just because it's a little moist helps everything bond together and we're going to make tiny little patties out of them and then throw them in the deep fryer. Just got a little bit of oil boiling on the fire there. All right there we go. I was able to flip two. One of them broke but looking pretty good. Those two are actually are probably good to go any minute now. Here's our smorgasbord. We got wraps, rice and falafel, onions and green peppers and chicken. That is the meal for today. Healthy amount of veg. Top her off. Not sure what our daughter's doing. It's a big log eh Kaya? Yeah. So this is wild mint that I found by the water. Wild mint has these purple flowers there. Lavenderish pink I guess. And yeah we'll let that steep for a while and then we'll come back to it. Well how's your wild mint tea? I really like it. It tastes very fresh. I'm surprised it tastes like candy cane. Like spearmint. Oh yeah I know what you mean. Maybe it is spearmint. Spearmint is what it tastes like. Yeah it was a decently long day paddling. It was about four hours. Four? Four hours of paddling so it wasn't too bad. We were expecting it to be five to six. I'm out shirtless but the skeeters aren't bothering me. They never do which is nice. I just caught one on my foot. Yeah. Enjoy the view. We are some kind of glamping today. We've got eggs, mushrooms, there's some random broccoli in there and hopefully within the next half hour we'll be done everything and within the next hour we'll be on the lake paddling over to our next spot. We got wraps, mushrooms and eggs and we have some bacon bits. There we go. There she is. Start our own meal at a new company. The Saturday special. So I wanted to show you where I got the mint from. Mint seems to like moist areas being by the water. That's where I always find it whenever I go looking for it and it's all right here. So it's got that lavender flower on it. Flowers. It is morning but it is pretty pretty calm at least on this side. The other side is a little bit more windy. We just did a little exploring and look right in our campsite. It's a nice bone. There's more down here. Maybe we could scare off some campers. Okay that's my bone. Yeah yeah you just got to be careful because this when you cast it this might come and fall in the water. Okay so I just have to hold it there. No flip that top part over. Now you do it. Dina! Oh well that's what you get. That's what you get when your husband breaks the fishing rods and you have to do special things. This campsite right near the portage route is kind of like it'll be annoying because there'll be a lot of people there but you got your own cove right here. It's a big hill. You can do it. Oh keep going. Kaya? Getting all the water. Kaya do you want to stay in the canoe? You don't want to get out? Good girl. Oh wow see look and there's the toilet right back there. You got Dina. She's working on the fire. I'm working on the tent. We just got here. Got our stuff laid out. It looks like it's going to be a windy day. This is a much better site than the other sites that we went to. We passed the first site on Prue Lake and it was just a little bit too close and too busy of an area so we skipped that and then we went on the next one on the next peninsula. I went out and I looked at it and I really didn't like it. I didn't like the site because there was a lot of... there wasn't a lot of shade so there's a lot of sun if if it became a sunny day and I'm not good with sun. The next one we went to there was no chairs or anything like that and it was in kind of a mucky area so this site is just after the next peninsula with two sites. We're just on the second site on that peninsula. I'm gonna make some fried rice. The best way to make scrambled eggs is you put it on heat and then you take it off and then you mix it. When you mix the egg put a lump of butter in it so the butter will melt with the eggs cooking so it gets infused and makes it a lot more velvety. On some heat, take it off. A little bit more work but worth it. Mushrooms and broccoli. A taste in mushroom that emulates beef and so sometimes when people want vegetarian burgers they'll use portobello mushrooms to kind of emulate the beef flavor. It's a beautiful area. So I need to backwash the filter. Just clean it out. So here's my bottle of clean water and here's my empty bottle which I'm going to use to backwash the mini sawyer. So let's do this. So clean end goes into the clean bottle and we're gonna push the flow backwards. So just drop it on here. All right there you go. Wow oh gross. So now it's getting clean. The water that's coming out now is cleaner but that first bit, that color, that should be good. When we're making our bread we got to activate this yeast. So I'm and normally I use a big pot but I'm just going to try something different with this little cup here. Add some water. Alrighty so we let this sit for about 20 minutes or so. It's frothed up nicely. Now it's going to go right into this mixture. So it looks like that. I'm just going to keep mixing it a little bit more and then I'm going to let it rest and then we'll come back to So I am out. I'm just going to set up my bear bag but at the same time I love exploring around the campsite. So I'm actually decently far away from the campsite and you can see here this is a worn out path. It's almost like a game trail. Now there's no campsite that's this way so it's really interesting that it's like cleared out here and you can see there's a noticeable path. It's kind of interesting. At a lot of the campsites it's actually pretty hard to find a good tree to lasso this around and string up your your bag because a lot of these trees shed their lower limbs because all of their energy is going to the top of the, excuse me, is going to the top of the tree, right? But right now, yeah, I'm just kind of exploring. Still following this trail. You can see the trail still comes here. You can see like twigs and stuff are broken off. There's still a very clear trail. It opens up here. You can see that has been stepped on. Oh that feels so good. Oh wow. Oh man. This is nice. I don't know about you guys but I love walking in the forest barefoot. Find stuff like this. You can't get this anywhere where I live. Oh nice. Okay so the trail came through there and it looks like it can continue down there. Like I wouldn't say it goes down this way. It can continue down here as well. So let's go this way. Just see like, oh you can see a noticeable imprint here. That's interesting. I don't know if you can tell on the camera but there's noticeable indentation there. Now it might have just been someone who was at the site before decided to hike over here but that's interesting how if you really concentrate you can see what has been touched and used and you can see what has been disturbed recently like this. Obviously that was like that but it was up like that. Come over here. Who knows. Hmm. Let's continue down this way. This would be a lot better if I had pants on because I'm just walking like this. Okay this is cool. This tree can hold my weight or if it's going to break down. So we got a little cove here. So that's right where I just was. I came up a bit and now look. Pure indentation marks and another trail here. So yeah this has definitely got to be a game trail. By some of those indentations they kind of look like bear marks, bear tracks. So let's follow. Also right here you can tell this piece of wood has been kicked down. Continue following it. Something uprooted that rock. Sometimes when a tree falls roots will get uprooted which will uproot the rocks but you can see there's no no tree fallen that would have done that. A beaver chewed on this tree over here. Ouch. Ow. I got whipped in the face. Let's see if there's any. Oh look you can see clear. You can see it follow here. Wow. 100% I'd be fishing here if my fishing rod wasn't broken. Wow this is so cool. Okay I'll uh come back if I see something. One thing I will grab while I'm here is this right here. This and it's stem. This is called pickerel weed and it's edible and they actually grow a pinky lavender. I don't know if you can see it on the camera. There's one way over there. Pink lavender flower and it and it's all edible. I haven't found anything crazy but I just wanted to show you how beautiful this is. Got moss and the ferns and everything. Wow. Also that is a bear track. You can see each of its toes. Boom boom boom boom. So they're around. They are around. Up here seems like uh going back on the game trail up here. All right well that was a pretty good adventure. If I see anything else I'll let you know but looks like there's a another trail that comes through here that's been uh that's been screwed over by this uh fallen down tree here. But I'm just gonna follow this and see where it takes me. I know my campsite's in this in this general direction so see if it'll take me there. Clover. Another wild edible. It's clover or is this uh yeah wood soil. But I just wanted to get a tiny little bit of crunch into it. There we go. So this is the other thing we're having. Chickpea korma. We took it on our last trip and it was really good so we're bringing it again. It's got green beans and cauliflower. It's a good way to bring your vegetables. This whole meal. Rice, turkey, and this. A dollar for the rice, a dollar for the turkey, and two dollars for this. What do you think honey? So good. All righty so for dinner we got pasta primavera from Mountain House. Got some water boiling for it. And totally not burnt buns. Looks way worse on the GoPro but that's a good brown. Golden brown. Water's boiling. Gonna add it to here. Haven't, I don't think I've had this one so I'm curious how well it tastes. These are good. It's about, I think I got this for $11.99 or $12.99. It's good for two portions. Here's our meal. Pasta primavera with some buns. These buns I uh I added butter in at the end and that stuff on top is Italian seasoning and some rosemary and a little bit of garlic powder. So we's going to dig in. Delicious. Oh yeah. Such a good crunch to soft ratio. Just perfect. Wow you make the best buns. We eat better out here than we do at home. Kaya likes hers too. Good fold usage Kaya. Well I don't know if you can see us, probably not, but that is because my light broke. So on top of my GoPro stand breaking, my fishing rod breaking, and then my other GoPro stand breaking, it's all just adding up. But we had a good dinner. Yes we did. Yeah and it got, it started to get really cold so we came into bed and it's about nine o'clock. About nine o'clock. We say we'll wake up early but we won't. I think we need a little bit more. Now here we go guys. We got roasted garlic mashed potatoes and we got corned beef hash. There we go. Let's put some of this right on here. Yum. How is it? Better than your mom's cooking? So good I'm crying. Yeah. That's quite a lot of food for three bucks. So if you're a solo, this could be your breakfast and lunch. And if you're a regular person, it could probably be your breakfast lunch and dinner. My rod, something's missing. So I gotta reel it in like this. So it's gonna make it pretty hard. Who knows what I'll catch or if I'll catch anything. Just wouldn't mind eating fish tonight. I got one. Y'all didn't think I could fish but I got one. No problemo. Well they say use a bigger lure to catch bigger fish. This is one of the biggest lures I got. I only keep catching this little guy. Nice. Thank you. If you don't want to sweat, I'm gonna burn your hole. Wonderful job honey. You're almost there. And you love me to death? Yeah. Not a thing. Come on, we need some firewood, baby. All right, if you say so. Come on, you heard him. We need some firewood. Why don't you put your hair in a ponytail? I know, right? Well it'll get out of the way. Stop it from getting burnt accidentally by the fire. I love how she's not even scared. I just throw an axe right beside her, she doesn't even move. No one would be scared of an axe with you, honey. Watch out. We're in our tent because we're getting rained out right now. It came on pretty light. We weren't too worried. Then it started going on pretty hard. We built a little trench system around the tent to flow the water away from us, but it's pooling up a little bit somewhere. I missed somewhere. We're just having some more of our breakfast. You like the rain, Dina? When you're in the forest, the rain doesn't really bother you. It's like, remember on our last trip, we hiked through it all? Yeah. We hiked through a rain storm. That rain's coming down so much harder now. You got a sensitive spot, Kyle? Well everything is mostly dried up now, but there's some water here. I wanted to show you what my trenching system looks like. So a lot of it was building up here, and then it was just flowing like this. Down there, down there, and down into here. You can see and you can kind of see how it gets darker. It did work really well. And I had one that went around here, stopped the water from coming from down there. From up there, it stops. And then here too. So it was actually building up here, so I filled in this area with more dirt and scraps. And it came, and this doesn't look like it, but this goes down like a foot, and it was completely soaked, completely full. So it worked really well. So here's a little bundle of fire starter that I created. It's a little tough because it just rains, so everything's a little wet. It's a lot harder than it looks. What are you trying to say? I was just getting the... I'm doing so good. Looks like I couldn't do it. So I'm just gonna light the bundle of fire starter with the lighter. This lighter is not... Ow! Oh, this lighter is ouchy. It's not that easy. Okay, there we go. Catch and keep going. I guess I'm a failure. I can't even light a bundle of fire starter. So much for surviving on alone. I think it's time to get a haircut. I haven't had one in a long time. Actually, the last time I got a haircut was for my wedding, which was the beginning of May. So right now I am just out looking for some wild edibles, and we just need something to add a little bit of flavor. Oh, there's some right there. Okay, so this right here, this is edible. Let's pick the nice ones. There we go. I'm not going to take all of the ones that are here. I'm just going to find... Oh, there's some more over here. It's kind of interesting. You can add a few to whatever you're eating, and you'll get a good taste from it. It's very citrusy. It'll be enough to add some flavor. Look at this beautiful place I'm in. Got wild animals everywhere. And this little spot I'm in is really cool. Everything's got moss covered. Everything's moss covered. Along with the rice, we got Uncle Ben's beans, southern chili style. We're going to attempt to make some birch tea. So this is a bunch of birch twigs that I ripped up, and I bent them all around. I'm going to put it in this hot water, and the water should turn an orangey-red color, and it should have the flavor of wintergreen. Let her boil in there for a few minutes and see how it turns out. A little bit orangey in color. Now for the taste. Very interesting and good. Very wintergreeny. That's so interesting. There's almost like a candy taste, but I can't figure out what it is. Or maybe not candy. It's interesting that you can go into the forest and get this taste. It's wintergreen. That's what the taste is. So you know those Lifesavers? Oh, that's what I was going to say. It tastes like a mint I would put in my mouth. Like a mint. That's what the flavor is. Yes, that's it. So if you can see it in there, I put a little piece of cedar as well. But yeah, you can see how it's changed color. I like this as much or maybe more than the mint tea we had. Alrighty, for our last dinner, we have Beef Pho, Backpacker's Pantry. You can see all the stats there. All right, so this is teriyaki noodles from Sidekicks. It's one of their new products. I love it. And you also got some crunchy crispy onions we're going to add to it. There we go. Oh, nice. Bowl activated. So it came with a sriracha packet and lime packet. Not big on spices, so I added the lime packet. And the lime packet was a little bit too much, I think. Look at the difference. This was $11.99 and this was $1.99. Interesting. Both very good. I don't know if you can see us or not, but it's about 8.30. Maybe we're heading to bed. All the loons are saying goodnight to us. We're going to wake up. We got alarms set for 5.30. Hopefully, we'll wake up to it and we're going to head out as quick as we can. We're worried that the weather might be bad tomorrow. We found the coolest spot. It was an adventure. We found this one spot that looked like nothing we've really seen before. It was kind of like being in the middle of the jungle. And it was just incredible. If I could stay there for another 10 hours and just stood there, I would. That is the end of day three. And listen to the loons. All right, it's 5 a.m. Dina is packing up the tent. I made the fire. I'm gonna make some breakfast. And once the sun starts getting over the horizon, we're gonna get out of here. Kaya has been ready to go for a while now, but she didn't help packing up. Did you? No. Here's our beautiful view. And we have a liftoff. Bye, Mr. Campsite. Of course, it started to rain as soon as we got on the lake. Nice. Loon right in front. Just went under. It's interesting. If you look, there's supposed to be a portage right here, but there's no visible sign of it. So if you didn't have a map, you'd be kind of S.O.L. But luckily we do have a map, and it's basically right in the middle of your screen. And the wind today is the opposite of what it was when we were coming in. So we had it against us coming in, and we're having it against us going out, unfortunately. Wind's against us again. What luck. Good job, honey. Alrighty, as you can see, we're out of the first little cove there, and we're getting onto the middle of the lake, and she's a raining. She's gonna be raining this whole paddle, most likely. All right, so the wind and the rain upgraded a little bit. We probably won't record much more after this unless we sit on the sit on an island for a bit. At least the wind isn't too bad, but the rain is. She's getting there. Nice. We got no wind here because the trees are blocking it off. You watch. Kaya's got her poncho on, eh buddy? Oh, you're nice and warm. I have no idea, I don't get it. Like people can't just park there either. It's only for getting in and going out. GoPro, stop recording.