I've camped at Presqu’ile Provincial Park in Ontario every
summer and at times in the spring and fall for over 40 years. It is a home away
from home and holds a lot of great memories as a kid and an adult.
It has gone through a lot of changes
over those years, as you would imagine, some for the better and some for the
worse. I could write a book on these changes but will try to keep my thoughts
as brief as possible.
It still remains a great park for
camping with good sites however the CAMIS reservation system is not the best online.
I spoke with many campers who are dissatisfied with how it works now and what
appeared to be very slow servers. Twice while booking sites I was kicked off 3
or 4 steps into reserving the site and lost the site I wanted. I never had this
issue in the past. I hope they upgrade before next winters reservation period.
For some reason, maybe to save on fuel
costs, the park workers weren’t cutting the grass as often as they should prior to the lack of rain when it was growing a lot. Plus,
there are a lot of areas that used to be kept cut that no longer are and this
looks dreadful. I'm sure it has something to do with the naturalists wanting to
keep the park a more natural setting. It just looks like they're lazy or too
cheap to cut the grass the way it used to be. I’d say it makes it harder to
spot the deer but that’s another story.
The main roads in the campground need to be
paved or resurfaced properly right away. Not only have they been patched over
and over and are very bumpy but the dust kicked up by passing cars is
disgusting and an absolute disgrace. Anyone camped on the side of the road where the dust is blowing
towards is constantly eating the dirt, having to clean their vehicles and must
keep their tents and trailers closed up tight to avoid having everything
covered in grit.
This has been like this for many years
and so far the best solution the park staff have come up with is to pour a
little water on the roads to try and keep the dust down but this happens
infrequently and does little to solve the problem. Campers will even walk back
and forth with jugs of water and will wet the road themselves for some relief.
Not exactly what these paying customers had in mind for an activity when they
booked their vacation.
For the amount of money that is spent in
the park each year you would think they could afford to properly pave the
roads most in need. At the very least, pave the main roads around High Bluff and Trails End
where the problem is the worst. Use recycled asphalt on the other campground
roads. But it seems the powers that be would rather stay under budget and
continue to find temporary and cheap solutions that really aren't solutions at all.
One nice change recently was the
addition of newly built comfort stations on High Bluff, The Pines and the
Maples campgrounds. Although I guess they couldn't afford to put hot water into
the Pines washroom. Now they just need to build one more with showers near
Trails End.
I'd also suggest that as every camper
registers upon entry, they be given not just the park newspaper that contains
the rules but a separate piece of paper with five or six of the main rules that
are constantly being broken. Among those are people cutting through campsites
not their own and washing dishes at the fresh water taps where people get their
drinking water.
And speaking of drinking water, what
does the health inspector think about the dumping station being located only a
few metres from the fresh water tap. While one camper dumps their septic tanks,
another is filling their holding tank with drinking water. It would be a smart
idea to move the location of the drinking water across the road where trailers
could fill up with water in a much healthier location. Plus with the tanks
being on different sides of the trailers they could set up the new water
filling station so trailers could fill up on either side.
Finally, the biggest safety issue in the
park is the speeding. How a child hasn't been killed or injured is just luck.
The speed limit in the campground is 20 Km/h yet it is not uncommon to see cars
doing 40-60 Km/h at times in the camp area. Campers can often be heard yelling
at the speeders to slow down but if the security would set up on foot and catch
and fine a few each weekend, it would go a long way towards solving that problem. It
wouldn't take long to nab a few and they're easy to spot. You can see their
dust flying from some distance down the road.
I know to some this all might sound like
nitpicking but the back of every campers registration card that goes in the
post at the campsite has a place where suggestions can be added and turned in.
I have a sneaky suspicion that a lot of those cards are either ignored or just
filed and forgotten. This might be a little more public and harder to ignore.