Manitoba has Begun!

(By the way .... we wrote two blogs today to catch up. Read the 'rain,sun' one first!)
After Sleeping Giant, we headed to Quetico Provincial Park. We went through the lovely town of Thunder Bay, where the first stand up citizen we came across cut Katie off in her lane and then yelled a stream of words that should not be written in a blog. What a beautiful town!
We were really excited about Quetico because it was well known internationally for its conservation and wildlife, but unfortunately the majority of the park was only accessible by canoe or floater plane. So we went to their main campground, and settled in for the night. We were there too late to buy wood, but Chris used his Davey Crockett skills and gathered enough dead wood from the forest around us to create quite the fire. When it all burned down we went to bed on the coldest night of our trip; it went down to about 5 or 6 degrees and the two of us woke up with even our heads buried deep into our sleeping bag. It was freezing! The next morning involved nice hot showers, which thawed us out, and after a quick breakfast (where we met a very curious little squirrel who jumped right onto our cutting board as we ate) we headed to the glorious province of Manitoba!
Our original intention was to stay at Falcon Lake campground in Whiteshell Provincial Park of Manitoba, pretty much right after the border. Nice name, awful campground, we soon found out. It was pretty much a swamp, and every site was saturated to the point where your feet sunk into the ground when you walked. It looked like everyone was camping in the front yards of a suburb with the lack of trees and privacy. The lady at the Manitoba Provincial Information Centre had mentioned a place called Grand Beach Provincial Park, about 2 hours north of Falcon. Since we had already driven 6 hours that day, another 2 seemed more than doable and we were on our way. Chris loved it, because most of the road was a windy, hilly, inconsistent track, which somebody decided should be a 90km/hr zone. In the two hours we drove that road, we saw two other cars, but lots of beautiful scenery.
As soon as we pulled into Grand Beach we knew we had made a great choice. The sites were pretty and private, nobody was around, and the site we chose was right next to a path to the beach, which is known to be one of the most beautiful beaches in North America. We hiked along the beach's dunes, and watched the two storms coming in from opposite ends of the horizon towards our campsite. When we got back to the site we (well, Chris) set up a tarp haven, cooked up some pasta with veggies and mixed beans (yes moms, we are eating healthy!), and head to bed after a long day. This morning the rain came hard. We were woken around 7 am by the downpour on the tarps above us, and at that very moment decided for sure it would be a lazy, sleepy, catch-up-on-blogs kind of day. We went right back to sleep in the comfort of our dry, warm tent. Now here we are at Ty's Surfside Deli and Bakery (where the owner has been so nice and let us hang out and drink coffees and eat his awesome food and work on the internet for the last few hours!).
So far, so good! (Thompson, here we come!)