Canada Day 2020 Awenda Provincial Park, at Lake Huron shores

July 1, 2020 left home at 7.30am and drove to Awenda Provincial Park with a picnic lunch. Had a great time. The weather was great , Not too many people, no entry fee (12.25) as it was Canada day! 

Here are a few photos.

 I loved this spot! One can sit with feet in the lake, in the shade of the trees and enjoy the scene.

 These ridges in the sand under the water was amazing...why is the sand/ridges not  flattened out by the force of the waters?

 The beauty of this lake is that one can walk into the lake...the water is not cold and  the stones in the lake are not slippery as there's little or no algae

This is one of the rare shores where one can find granite river stones...smoothened and rounded by centuries of the force of water. These stones had ring like patterns on them. I wish I had picked a few!

Tree roots blackened by their time in the waters...contrasted with the vivid green of the leaves.

Lunch by the lake...with a book, husband and sea gulls for company. A great plus point of this park is that there are many parking places and all of them are steps away from the lake. One does not have to lug the food for a long distance to eat by the lake.

Hundreds of lotus in the nearby Kettle lake...the weird thing about Kettle lake was that the waters were clean,  transparent at one end and smelly, not transparent and marshy and with lotus at another end.
Kettle lake is  surrounded by a cliff which goes round the lake and we can get down to the lake on paths going down to the lake.

 Above is the non-marshy part of Kettle lake and below are photos of  the marshy end of Kettle lake.

One of the weirdest experiences about today's visit was seeing millions, literally millions of caterpillars all over the trees, plants, leaves in this park...they were literally on every single tree and in the hundreds on each plant and in the thousands on each tree I think! I also heard a crunchy sound all the time and I am sure it is the sound of these caterpillars. either their eating or falling on the dried leaves. I cannot attribute that sound to anything else, logically.

Googling on the drive home, I discovered that this is these are the caterpillars of the Gypsy moth and this is the worst ever infestation in this area and it has been going on for the past 5 years! Apparently this huge number of caterpillars occur once in every decade (or some such number) for 3-5 years continuously! And there is no way of killing them with complete success...aerial spraying in spring is one way but now (July) it's too late.

Apparently these have devastated over million acres of forest trees in USA and Canada in a year.

I wish I had done the trails. We only did the Beaver pond trail. I wish I had done the Nipissing trail which is supposed to have great views.
As usual we had packed out favorite picnic lunch of Chitranna and Mosaranna. Desert was mango and Besan peda. Tim Hortons coffee on the way kept the driver awake and alert. All in all, a nice day.
At the end of the day... skin on my fingers and arms were smarting due to sun burn ...despite  a full arm cotton jacket, cotton gloves  and 2 cotton duppatas draped on the arm exposed to the sun coming through the car windows.