The last days have been really rainy. The sun has been shining in Ontario for over three months straight, but as soon as we arrived, the weather has changed to Hamburg's Schietwetter :-D
The day before yesterday we went to Waterloo by car and repacked our backpacks for the upcoming trip to the Algonquin Park. Last year's exchange students passed on a lot of stuff to the current exchange students. We call that "heritage" even if noone died ;-)
So we had a look into our stuff and added all our winter gear to the almost room high mountain of boxes and bags.
Now we are currently living in the hostel
"Pembrok House", which is compared to the
"Canadiana Backpackers Inn" way worse. The Canadiana is clean, has couple of big common rooms, a great kitchen, an outdoor area and is full of young travellers, who sit in the living rooms and have a talk. Also the Canadiana has a lot of big lockers in the basement and one for every guest in his/her room. The Pembrok house has just a little locker in the rooms, but everyone's key fits into everyone's locker.. how smart is that?
The Pembrok House is a little dirty, the kitchen is sticky and yellow. Out of nowhere there were cold waterdrops dropping into my food. There is almost no cutlery, no bowls, no plates and in the very small common room where is no one sitting. And it is only 2 CAD cheaper that the Canadiana.
Besides that it is in a quite bad neighbourhood. The next street looks like the redlight district of Toronto with a lot of really strange people.
So why are Philipp and I here? Well, that's simply because every guesthouse in toronto had no beds left for two people for the last night. That was more or less our only option.
Nevertheless, the night was calm, the A/C worked fine, we got new towels a the shower was great. So... it's okay ;-)
Yesterday we went to the
Mountain Equipment Center (MEC) to buy the necessary gear for the algonquin park, like gas, pots, some rope to hang up the food between trees against bears. All the stuff we grabed ended in a 270 CAD bill :-D For two of us...
Today the third person of our
Algonquin Park team will arrive in Toronto and probably spend the night with us in the Pembrok house. Tomorrow morning we will meet the fourth guy and start the trip to Algonquin Park where we probably will be staying for 10 days.
We will take the Northlane Bus to
Huntsville and then take a cab
right into the park. It is only allowed to camp on designated camp sites, but there are over 1900 inside the park. So we definitely will find one.
Sorry for not having any photos yet. I am writing this post on the hostel's guest computer and I don't have an USB cable with me at the moment. But I definetly will do that as soon as we are back in Waterloo where all my computer gear is stored.