Jeep Trail to Nowhere and Cabin Life on an Off-Grid Island/// EFRT S5•EP27

Welcome to another episode of The Epic Family Road Trip. In this week's episode of The Epic Family Road Trip, we leave the island in search of a ghost town we'd read about called Collins Inlet. If we make it there, we plan to set up camp for the night before returning to the island to take you on a tour of our little log cabin. Ready. Alright, so today we are headed to a place called Collins Inlet. It's an old town that was based around a lumber operation back in the day, but the whole town caught on fire back in the day and was abandoned and now it's just a ghost town and the remnants of it sit somewhere down the road. We're gonna go and try to explore this place. Apparently, it's only accessible by water. If you look it up online, it can only be accessed using a canoe, boat, or some kind of water transportation. But we heard from some locals that there is actually an old road that you can follow, so that's what we are aiming to find on this trip. It's gonna be pretty fun to see if we can find it and see an old town in Canada. Regulators, bound up. There's like a decent sized little swamp up ahead. Kind of drive through it. Should be fun. Just went into four low just in case it's a little deeper and slicker at the bottom than we think. It looks like it's obviously a part of this road, so it'll probably be gravel bottomed, but slick. So it seems we see a broken down sign here, but it does say, notice, please be advised that access beyond this point is prohibited and that this is a part of reserve lands. It must be not recent, but recent enough that the information we had that you can get there by road is pretty outdated. So we're gonna just turn around and find a new spot to go, a new road to explore, and somewhere else we can. All right, so we're heading, we turned around, we're heading out. On the GPS I could see that it was part of the Indian Reserve, but you couldn't see that it was blocked off until we got here. So we thought part of the adventure will be seeing how far we can get and at what point do we have to turn around, if any. I was kind of hoping it would go all the way to Collins Inlet like it did back in the old days, but it's not the case anymore. So we're gonna look for another trail here. There's plenty of trails and hopefully we find another big camp spot near open water. Open water is important to keep the bugs down at this time of year. As you probably know, in this part of the world there's a lot of black flies and mosquitoes and this is prime season for them. They die off later in the summer, but right now it's not much fun being outside. So unless you're like on our island, we get a good breeze coming off the lake and it keeps the bugs away. So that's the kind of camp spot we're looking for today. On the GPS, but I didn't realize it was that big of a river. That goes all the way out. Very cool. A bunch of the fishing here is great. It's more of a lake if you zoom out here on GPS. So these are all small lakes and then it's almost like a river, but yeah I guess it might be a river that flows between these larger lakes. Kind of nice. If we weren't going elsewhere, we'd stop and cast a line in there. I bet you the fishing is great. Looks like nobody's been back here in forever. If you look in the mirror right now, I've never seen so many mosquitoes. All right, we just drove up with the Bell Lake Road and this is a really great spot. You can see through the trees, Bell Lake, and I'll show you that in a minute. But just so you know a bit about this spot, there's no vehicle-based camping. It's all interior camping accessible by canoe or kayak. You can rent canoes here. You can pay for your permits here between May 1st and Thanksgiving and if you go before that or after that, you have to go all the way up to Clarney Provincial Park and pay for a permit there. So yeah, it's backcountry camping. Pack in light and no cans or water bottles or things like that are allowed in the spots. You can have a fire unless there's a fire ban, but most of the time there isn't in designated spots. And it's absolutely beautiful. This is what they call the Laclosse Mountains in here, which is white dolomite rocks and they look like almost snow-capped hills and it's just absolutely beautiful. Take a look at this. This is a bit of what we're talking about here. The rock is so pure white that it almost looks it's got snow on it in the middle of the summer. And this is called Silver Peak and it's 539 meters or 1768 feet tall. It's probably the highest area around here. For this part of Ontario, that's what we will call the mountain. Hey little guy. This little painted turtle. We saw him crossing the road. Love turtles. Those colors. I think they're a lot fatter than most. What a fun day we had. We went out there looking to see if the parks were open yet and to see if there was any like really good crown land to camp on. And everything just seemed to just not work out. And I don't know if you guys have ever experienced that, but it just happens sometimes. But in a way we were kind of relieved because we can come back to the cabin and just kind of chill. I think tomorrow we're going to take you around, show you why we come to this place. And we've been coming here now for I think about 17 years now. That's when Peter and I got our little cabin. And we've had to two years ago add on to it. Anyways, we'll tell you the story. I'm going to take a second and show you my favorite room of the cabin, which is actually a room that's not in the cabin. It's a screened-in porch here. Come inside. But before I go in, I'm going to show you this sweet driftwood handle on the door. And we try to collect things as we travel. And this one we found on a beach in Oregon. And it just looked so unique and we kept it with us for over many, many miles. And we didn't know what we'd use it for. When we got here, we thought that would make a perfect door handle. And so that's what that came from. It's small. It's cozy. It has my favorite chair, but man, I could sit here and read and write working on my second book. And this is the perfect place for reflecting. You can hear the sounds of the birds and the lake, but you're still inside. So in the spring when the bugs are bad, which that's supposed, this is our bug season and there's almost no bugs, but this is a fully screened-in porch just to give you a very comfortable place to spend some time. Right, let me show you around the cabin. Come on in. So these cabins that were on the property were built in the 40s and 50s and it's called the Scandinavian scribe log home. So you'll notice there's no chinking between the logs. They're carved out to fit so closely together that you don't have to put whatever they use for chinking. And it is a well-insulated wall and these have stood up to the test of time. The only maintenance we have to do is just keep kind of a lacquer on them every couple of years. So we want to really maintain the antique look of this place without modernizing it too much, just things that we have to change to be able to live here full-time. But in general, we leave it the way it was. We still have propane lighting, which creates an amazing ambience. And as you may or may not know, there's no power here. We generate power and we use solar, mostly solar, and run a small generator if we're running a bigger appliance like the old washer that we use. But while we're here, you can see that Carol found a really nice place to hang her antler that she found when we were crossing Canada. So that is a nice addition to the cabin. So this is our little sitting area here and we'll sit and read and or play board games here. We also have a place to watch movies. We don't have TV up here and that's on purpose. We just think TV would take away from the atmosphere of this place, but we are not out of touch. We do have satellite internet so that we can stay in touch for business and keep uploading these videos, things like that. But we can also check in on the news if we want to from time to time. So we stay informed, but by choice we don't have TV here. And that I think is what makes one of the reasons why it's so special and such a quiet, calm, restful, peaceful place. All right, so this is where Daniel and I sleep. Our room is a part of the new extension which we built onto our cabin about two summers ago. And one of the coolest parts of our room is that the entry to it is actually the old entrance of the original cabin. So everything is exactly the same as it was when they built this cabin back in the early 40s. One of the best parts about coming back to our cabin and coming to our room in particular is that we've collected a ton of cool stuff over the years of traveling and we've placed it all here in the room. And every time you look at it you can picture the spot. A lot of the things we have in the room are from how it was originally. Like this Whitney Point blanket, they would have gotten it. This is kind of a symbol of Canada. This and Hudson's Bay Point blankets are a big symbol of Canada. And this old skeet, there's clay pigeons in here which you use for skeet shooting. But the guys that own, the original owners of the island and these cabins, wrapped them in newspapers from their time to preserve the clays. But these are from either right after or right before World War II. These pictures of Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman as presidents I guess is after World War II. And there's one even up in the main lounge on this island that has a newspaper that says that Canada's declaring war after Britain did on Germany, which is pretty cool. But other things like this hog skull was my first ever hog hunt in Texas. This is our bed. We have a bunk bed. Daniel sleeps on top. It has his little things and I sleep on the bottom bunk. And just have all the books that I read and different stuff. And then coming over here, these rods are super cool. Antique rods that were actually hanging up in the rafters of this cabin since the original builders of it were here. And plenty of other things. Our bass and guitar. And then these walking sticks which I got this from on the shores of Lake Superior. And then we just sanded it down and just liked it to preserve it. Dana got his cool one actually from this island. He did the same thing. After going to tons of different national parks, thanks to the states and Canada, we've collected all those walking stick bins and we plan to one day put them on there. And then here's just where we lay our jackets and some other odds and ends. One interesting thing is this horseshoe. Upside down horseshoe is a symbol of good luck or it gives you good luck or something. We noticed that this has been here since they built the cabin. The original people would have put that up there. Since this is the main entrance, it's that original Scandinavian scribed log and saws everything pretty much untouched. So this is my room. I love this room because it's super cozy and it's really what was my dream room growing up because I always dreamed of having a round window. And I thought what better place to have a round window than in a log cabin bedroom. So the round window is definitely my favorite part of the room. But I also really love the shelves that my dad and my brother Peter built and installed on the walls. They have given me a lot more space down on the ground because it is a smaller room and then also given me a nice place to organize all of my things nice and neatly. And one of the things I was most excited to do to this room when we were finished building it was to decorate it with all of the cool little things that I've collected throughout our travels through New Zealand and Indonesia and all around North America. And I've also loved being able to have a place to display some of amazing old things and books that were here in the cabins from the original owners who lived in and built these cabins back in the 40s. So with living up here in the summers the last couple of years we had to build this addition on here to give us more space. First of all to give the kids their own bedrooms and me and Carol our own bedroom. But we also needed some pantry space for food and a room to put in a big off-the-grid propane-based fridge and freezer to store food. Because we're far away from town we need the ability to have lots of food here at least to last a week but usually a week and a half to two weeks. So one of the best parts of being up here and living here as a family is that you don't have the convenience of just calling somebody to build something if you need it or repair something. So as a family we've been learning skills that we never thought we had. I'm not that handy of a guy I always thought I wasn't but man since we've come here I've learned how to for instance this shelf set me and the boys built that ourselves. Maybe not the best fanciest piece of furniture but we're pretty proud of ourselves. We've learned a ton of excellent skills just because of the necessity of being off the grid being way away from everybody else. So that's definitely one of the benefits. So another room we built is a bathroom. Before this two years ago we were using an outhouse which is really rough in it. So now we have a bathroom in the house which is an utter luxury. As you know we pump water from the lake filtered water from the lake and into a water pressure tank and then it feeds the shower but it also runs through an on-demand propane based water heater. It's basically an RV water heater that's been installed in here. So everything runs off the grid which is really cool and allows us to be way out here but still have the conveniences of a hot water shower of a flushing toilet and of a sink. So this is one of the important new rooms that we put in in the last couple of years. This is our bedroom here. We went with the vaulted ceiling here in the cabin just to give a more space spacious feel but one thing we've learned while on the road the last five years is that we can do with a lot less space than we thought we needed back when we had a house and we've been traveling in a motor home and then we went down to rooftop tents and jeeps. So when we come up here to the cabin even though you'd consider a small bedroom for us it's huge and it gives us just more space than we actually need. All right now this section is the office. It's a very important part of any business of course and so Caroline sits here a lot of the times editing the videos that you're enjoying and when we're here at least and the kids will do home school here. When Pete's doing sales for my speaking business it happens in here so this is a really functional and useful part of the cabin. We've also got a good bookshelf going up here with all kinds of incredible books. A lot that I read back when I was in business and the kids are reading now and you can't beat an office with beautiful views of the lake on many sides and in the summer we open the windows here and listen to the beautiful sounds of nature just outside. Stay tuned for next week's episode where we take you along on a day in the life of our family living in our log cabin on an off-grid island in the wilderness of Ontario Canada. If you're enjoying our channel make sure you hit the subscribe button and the little bell to be notified of every adventure. We want to take a second here to thank our Patreon family for your support. We really appreciate having you guys as part of the Epic Family Road Trip family and in the meantime we'll see you down the road.