We stayed 3 nights at the Pinery Provincial Park, April 30 to May 3rd. A year-round, beautiful 4200 acre park on the shore of Lake Huron just south of Grand Bend, Ontario. It has about 13 kms of hiking trails plus an 8 km stretch of sandy beach. There is a canal that runs off the Ausable River that flows through the park on its way to the lake. The canal pretty much spans the park, has lots of fish judging by the number we saw flipping at the surface, and quite a few waterfowl that seemed to be nesting or setting up nests. Also in the park is a store, firewood, dump stations, heated showers and washrooms, hydro at the sites, and potable water throughout the park. For recreation you can rent canoes, paddle boats, water cycles, and bicycles. It rained two of the days we stayed and the 3rd was quite windy and bordering on cold. Gotta love Spring camping. The best part was the park was virtually ours, no noise, no crowds, no line ups. There are about 1000 campsites so it’s likely a hopping place in the summer. The sites we walked passed varied in size and some, like ours, had the electrical service point quite far from the trailer location.
The entrances to some of the individual sites had wide sweeping curved drives and some, like ours, didn’t. I kind of widened the boulevard across our site entrance by using the F250 to push back the shrubbery. Backing in required a turn greater than 90 ⁰ and the F250 doesn’t have a turning radius compatible with single lane roadways. Once in the site, we couldn’t hook up to the 30 amp service as we only have a 30 foot cord. Combining our 50 foot 15 amp to the 30 amp allowed us to hook up. It just meant we had to plan what could be turned on at the same time to prevent blowing the breaker. It made it to the low teens during the day and single digits at night; the last night dropping to 3C. Keeping the place warm on 15 amps took some electrical scheduling. We did have a beautiful site right on the canal and the couple beside us had hung bird feeders that attracted several types of song birds.
Due to the weather we never had a chance to kayak the canal or river but we did walk quite a bit and on one of the rainy days we drove to the beach for a look and then drove to Grand Bend to check it out. The road to the beach at Grand Bend has a short stretch of beach tourist stores and restaurants but the sidewalks were still rolled up and all but about 4 stores seemed open. The park is definitely worth a return trip.