As I planned the previous night,  I went to bed around 5:00PM and was asleep before 6:00 PM.  The goal, was to wake up for 12:40 (alarm was set) and get to the second beach so that I could look for meteorites in the sky around Arcturus.  I slept quite well, and woke for the appointed time.  I had prepared my gear the previous night, and got in my car, raising the parking brake lever by one click, and turning off my headlights.  this meant my vehicle was all but invisible in the darkness.  As we have a new moon, the darkness is complete.  On my front bumper I have mounted a small light bar, which is aimed down to avoid directly shining light at cars, tents, and people and also to highlight rocks and pits in the road.  I turned it on, and began creeping at ~10kph towards my destination.  This would be an infiltration mission, as second beach is in the super quiet area, enforced in the campground.  No noise, whatsoever after sundown.  I approached the barrier, and passed it creeping along, so quietly I could hear crickets chirping outside with my windows closed, and the only sound my car is making is a quiet hum of the engine, and shifting gravel.  I am pretending to be a park truck doing a security patrol, so far so good.  There are very few campers as well which is to my benefit.  I arrive at the parking lot for the beach.  I always become slightly unnerved as my lights disappear into a black nothingness at the edge of the water.  I parked, and got my red headlamp on, turned off the vehicle lights, and shouldered my gear.  I walked down to the beach after locking my car, mission completed.  And then, the car alarm started.  Holy crap.. that isn't me.. that is someone else..  someone else parked their car there and the car alarm went off.  I could see the lights blinking like an insane Christmas tree, to make things worse.. the geese that were apparently roosting nearby decided the honking wasn't quite loud enough and began to join in.  This car was no where near me.. I could not even understand what was happening..  but as quickly as it had started, it ended.  And then of course, started again.  Almost every 15 minutes for the next hour. 

I moved to the beach, deciding the cacophony of the car above was simply part of the normal wilderness noises at this point.  I aimed my star tracker towards Polaris, mounted everything and did some test shots.  I found that I was aligned enough for a 5 minute exposure, and any more than that overwhelmed the entire photo with white - and star streaks so more than good enough for me.  I pointed the camera at Arcturus and began shooting 5 minute exposures over the next hour.  1am to 2am - and, though I did see the odd meteorite, I never managed to catch them in a shot.  They were too sparse.  I did manage to see one glorious orange fireball but again, the camera was writing data and it was missed on 'film'.  I got some nice shots of the galactic center, but obscured by trees.  Tomorrow morning I will have to visit the point facing the other direction which is relatively easily accessed from my campsite.

I returned to my campsite around 3:00AM and retired for 2 more hours of sleep.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that my trailer had the top vent open while I was out, it was now 10c inside.. which had me considering breaking out the sleeping bag as a comforter.  I woke around 5:00 and began my first attempt at using my new cast iron pan.  It is a very small pan, not much bigger than the palm of my hand.  I brought the pan up to a temperature where it started to smoke, and then lowered the temperature a bit on my buetane stove.  I could manage to fit one strip of bacon in at a time, which I deposited into the lid of my titanium pot as I finished cooking them each.  now, I had a problem.  My pan was swimming in bacon grease..  and I hadn't thought to bring a container for it.  I ended up using a plastic bottle I had which I had intended to put into my fridge with water for cool water during the heat of the day.  It immediately melted - of course, and yes, I did spill some.. far away from my camp site, at least.  Bears come running for bacon, or at least, problem bears do.   So far no issues.   I made scrambled eggs after this, which did stick - I expected this, since I only had 3 coats of seasoning on the fresh pan, but those were placed in my lid/bowl and I shut down the stove and allowed the pan to cool in it's own time.   Breakfast was good, but the bacon I bought, was bargain of bargain brand, and wasn't that great.  The good bacon was $10.00 for a similar sized package, this was $4.00 which is much closer to 'normal' priced, but has a lot of fat, at not much meat.  Thanks Trudeau.

I boiled some water afterwards, which I made into coffee, and dishwater.  I let the pan soak a bit, and then used my chainmail scrubby to carefully remove the stuck on eggs.  It did so handily, and I could see that my seasoning had held well underneath.  I heated the pan again, to ensure the water was evaporated, and then gave it a light coating of grapeseed oil before allowing it to cool and washing the remainder of my dishes.

It was now about 6:30am, and I needed to get the day onward.  I would head for the granite ridges first, as it was across the road from the entrance to the campground and I had not yet received the park tabloid which would elaborate on much of the activities, ongoing events, and trail conditions.  The parking lot for the trail is an oval, and I really am not certain why, because one side has room for parking, and the other does not.  Perhaps this is for mountain bikers to ride in circles and rue the fact they are not allowed on this trail?  (i'd like to see them try ... honestly, mountain bikes are probably not so great at climbing the mountains on this trail).  I reached the summit in roughly 30 minutes, there were some difficult-ish sections, but it was no problem.  The view was amazing, and I managed to take a lot of pictures of the white mountains across the bay.  I will be stitching them together later, possibly today, if I have enough power in the editing laptop to do it.  I did also collect my own 'air force' though I had doused my clothing in deet prior, my hands were vulnerable, as the spray melts camera gear quite effectively I've found.  Not wanting to personalize my $4,000 camera with fingerprints, I opted to deal with it.  As a result, I imagine there will be several thousand more mosquitos in the next few days to hasten future hikers along the trail.  The temperature rose sharply up on the ridge as the sun came around and once I had had my fill, I returned  down the trail and back to the parking lot.  All in all I used half a litre of water for this hike, and now that it was past 9:00am I would stop at the park store for a park tabloid before heading back to my campsite, to adjust my solar panels and decide where to head to next.

After adjusting my panels, and a quick check-in with my parents, as they hadn't returned my call from the previous day, I headed for chickanishaing (SP??) and a nice walk over some granite and some time out by Georgian Bay.  This trail is a bit more challenging than the Granite Ridges trail,  and takes you up and down quite a bit based on my smart watch, I gained  23 flights of stairs, which would be counted as going up, and down, once for every flight.  the previous trail was only worth 10 by comparison.  Unfortunately, I would be joined on this trail by two women, one who would be classified somewhere close to 'recovering behemoth' and the other who would be classified as 'a bit chubby, but fairly normal sized for a country girl'.  They were both, quite, loud.  I raced ahead of them as quietly as I could, in hopes of not disturbing any wild life before they caught up.  I have always been good at using my momentum to move between rocks, and used this to my advantage - considering I had around 30 additional pounds of gear on my back, and the fact that the heat was rising, I was beginning to regret not refilling my water bottle when I had the chance.  The first bit of the trail followed the river, and there was the odd motor boat traveling in from the bay, which didn't get my hopes up further to see any marine wildlife.  However, my efforts would be rewarded, as a Canada Goose began following me in the water and honking quite angrily, and though I informed him that honking was illegal in Canada because It hurts the feelings of people who live in Ottawa, he persisted.   The reason, was evident a few minutes later, as There was around 5 goslings swimming along the far shore, accompanied by their mother, I assume.   I found a high perch and set up my tripod as they climbed on short to graze in the mud flats and grass.  After setting up my 500mm with 2x teleconverter, I zoomed in, and got quite a few hopefully good shots.. before the two women finally caught up with me.. nattering away and laughing about as loud as a person could, for no good reason it seemed.   This was enough for the Canadian Geese to evacuate, and I was left with no further chances such as that as I hung far back behind them as they traversed the bald rocks ahead of me.  Upon reaching the end of the trail, I noted there was a nice chair shaped rock, so I sat down there and pulled out a protein bar, and watched the waves come in while I ate and drank.  I took some video which hopefully recorded the sound of the experience, it was quite relaxing.  Far better to hear waves lapping against ancient granite, than some silly sand beach I say.  Though, admittedly, this trip, all told, including gasoline, provisions, and campsite fees has cost me over $1000. 

Returning from the end of the trail ended up being a bit more of a task, as the markings are confusing and lead to a place where no further markings are visible, I kept circling back to where I started..  I was getting tired, and felt a bit like some heat stroke might be setting in, and I'd used the rest of my water earlier - regret once again that I did not fill the bottle when I returned to my campsite earlier.  Thankfully, as a precaution I have come to start turning on my GPS and marking the parking lot of any trail I'm not thoroughly familiar with - as was the case on this trail, only having spent time on it several decades ago.  I was able to quickly find where I got off track, and rejoined the trail further along.  Though I ended up backtracking for about an hour, all in all it was an enjoyable experience.  Upon returning to the car, I rewarded myself with the remainder of the water that was in my second water bottle mixed with some Ketogenic enhancing drink mix.  It was gulped down greedily, as I have found my body craves it especially after exercise.

As my feet were sore, and lunch time was quickly approaching, this would be the end of my day's official hiking.  I had several gigabytes of photos and video to offload, batteries to charge and solar panels to move once again.

I returned to my campsite, and after changing out of my sweaty clothes, I retired to my trailer to give myself a wipe down with another product I'm trying.. Adventure Wipes.  They're wet wipes, basically, but huge, textured ones..  they fold out to a 12" square.  I was able to freshen up face, head and other unmentionable parts quite well with a single cloth.   There was salt crusted all over me, and my clothes from the sweat evaporating, but this handled that quite well.  I had intended to make use of the comfort station, but, as it would happen I forgot to bring my soap.  However, a swim may be in order, we will see if swimming or fishing from the point wins.

I had a light lunch, since earlier I had that protein bar, so I made myself some sugarless Kool-Aid and had a couple of cheese sticks while I began the task of copying files to the editing laptop.  It has a piss-poor battery life, due to it's gaming laptop origins, and the inverter in my trailer constantly chirps overcurrent when I'm using it otherwise while plugged in.  The battery I have just can't push out the current required, even though the inverter is 600W surge pure sine wave, and the laptop's power supply is 250W, The number one problem is the voltage of the battery dipping below 12v while I have it plugged in.  With Lithium batteries going up in price, when they were previously going down in price due to electric cars becoming more and more popular, I think to see the reason.  Lithium, being limited, as well as the cobalt and nickel needed to make batteries in large quantities is driving up the prices of pretty much anything that uses that battery chemistry.  I can't see this ending well.  But I digress, long story short, I'm going to need to invest in a lithium battery sooner rather than later.  A 100 amp-hour battery is still ~$500  I know I can get 2 6v deep cycle batteries for about the same, giving me about 240 amp-hours but they come with issues like weight, and slow charge rates compared to Lithium.  With Lithium, I can also use the entire capacity without much worry, where a Lead-Acid battery i could only use about 30-40% without damaging it's total capacity over time.

Anyhow, the end of the story here is my editing laptop is a no-go for much more than an hour's worth of photo work without being plugged in.  I get around this by shutting it down and charging it between uses, but at best at this site I can only get about 3 hours of solid sunlight on the panels before shadowing lowers their efficiency so much that they barely create enough power to overcome the standby draw of the fridge and the MPPT charger itself.   Since there's supposed to be a thunder storm this afternoon, I can bet I'll have even less power to deal with the following day as overcast skies do get rid of the shadowing problem, they also generate far less voltage.

I managed to get all my photos moved over, but only got up to the panorama photo I wanted to stitch before hitting 20% battery, where I decided to cancel the operation and shut down.  It is still sunny now, so I set the laptop inside the trailer to charge.  It still draws a whopping 4.5 amps to charge while off - up to 7 while plugged in and turned on and performing heavy lifting.  I'm surprised the power brick is able to handle that.  If it fails, i'll have to carefully research what kind of power draw I'm looking at as a heavier weight on the scale if or when I replace it.

Fishing won.  I really wanted to explore that point, as it faces the correct way to get the galactic center tomorrow morning (if it isn't overcast, which, it isn't supposed to be)  Getting out there at night without going for a swim with all my gear on would be easier if I had an idea what the landscape was like.  So I grabbed the rod, some lures, and reel.. and headed out.  First I spent some time on the west side of the point, looking towards first beach.  There were a bunch of idiots who rented a canoe and were slamming the gunnels and not going very far,  going back and fourth up and down the bay.  They may have been Russian, or Ukrainian, I kept hearing something that sounded like Russian from time to time as the guys on shore presumably made fun of the guys in the canoe.  I spent about half an hour casting from here, and caught nothing much more than weeds, and a bit of a suntan.  So now, I moved to the eastern side of the point, where the big smooth granite rock went steeply down into the lake.  I found a somewhat precarious position there and set up my chair and spent about another hour.  Once again, caught nothing, but enjoyed the view of the white mountains through the gap and the kayakers and canoeists which seemed to actually know what they were doing on this side.  It was around 4:30 by the time I returned to my site, and I decided to prepare dinner.  The clouds were starting to move in, so I opted to open up my mountain house beef-chili-mac and boil water, It has 50% your daily intake of salt, and if my clothes from earlier were any indication, I could probably use to replace about that much.  It was quite delicious, though a couple of the noodles were a bit crunchy.  I thought I put too much water in, but it turned out correctly otherwise.  I washed it down with some mint tea with the remainder of my water, and had a fruit salad cup as desert.  The sky is now completely overcast, and is starting to grumble.   I licked my fork clean, as it was my only sullied utensil for this meal, rinsed my mug and cleaned up the kitchen.   I was able to get into the trailer before the rain started, and now, as 6:00 PM rolls around the first few raindrops are starting to hit the roof.   My skylight window has a massive crack in it, but I forgot to mention, I did find some electrical tape in my tool kit - and I used that to layer about 5 times overlapping the crack..  it should hold, especially since I'm half under a maple tree here.  I will watch the storm until it ends, or I fall asleep.  I've already brushed my teeth and taken care of the usual bedtime things.