Kejimkujik National Park

It seems that every year we’ve been doing a lot of smaller trips and then one big trip. Well this is it folks, this is the big trip of 2017. We flew into Portland, ME, rented a car, and drove directly to St John, New Brunswick (Canada, people!!). The following day we took a ferry to the island province of Nova Scotia, we were enjoying the Maritimes for all they’re worth, and thus begins our trip of four national parks in a week! The first of which is Kejimkujik National Park.

Part of the Canadian National Park System

~ 2 hours east of Dartmouth, NS

After our day or so traveling to arrive at the official start of our trip at Kejimkujik NP or the “Keji” as the locals call it, we were so excited to be here. We arrived around noon ish and were spending one night here before heading on towards Cape Breton Highlands National Park. In total we had a day to spend here, but planned to make the most of our time.

Map of the area we explored, courtesy of Parks Canada

We were staying at the Jeremy’s Bay Campground in the Jim Charles loop. The first thing I really noticed when doing research and planning this trip was how large some of these campgrounds can be at Canadian National Parks, this campground had 360 campsites. We didn’t really experience this when we were in Alaska because everything is a little more remote and gets fewer visitors, so this was a bit of shock and something that made me apprehensive that we would all be camping right on top of each other. In reality, despite the number of sites within the campground, there was ample space between the sites. Although there wasn’t a ton of brush or small trees creating privacy, the sites were at least far enough away from each other that you didn’t hear everything that your neighbors were doing. Given the size of the campgrounds, they certainly had plenty of amenities, which were nice, like plenty of firewood stations, ice, and free trash / recycling bags. They even had washing stations for your dishes to discourage you from creating a mess at your site.

The campsite & ever faithful Coleman tent

When we first arrived, the people who were the previous occupants of our site were still packing up, so we drove over to Meadow Beach that’s in Jeremy’s Bay and hung out and relaxed for a little while before heading back over to our site. Once there we quickly set up and made our lunch while debating what we wanted to do with the rest of our afternoon. The BF was strongly suggesting the idea of kayaking or canoeing on the park’s namesake lake, while I was leaning towards exploring the hiking trails in the park. It was a beautiful day, nice and sunny but not too warm, so we decided to check out the lake situation. After talking with the woman at the kiosk at Jake’s Landing (the main launch point for anything lake related), we were convinced to go kayaking. The lake was apparently abnormally calm that day and the temperature was just right.

The lake and calm waters

The lake is large and there are a number of islands in the middle that you can camp on. If we lived closer, this would certainly be something we would want to come back and do sometime. There were others on the lake, but with the size of the lake and the number of things to see we never ran into anyone or felt crowded out. We rowed around the lake for a few hours until our shoulders were sufficiently sore, enjoying the sunshine and light breeze on the lake.

Another shot of the lake & all the islands!

We headed back to our campsite and then hiked around on some of the trails that were close to our site for a while before coming back and making dinner. We had a fire that evening and relaxed with some wine and beer by the fire, savoring the first night out in the woods on our vacation.

The next morning, we ate breakfast, lingered around, and then packed up and left. As we were headed all the way to the eastern end of the island to Cape Breton, we wanted to get a move on so we wouldn’t get there super late at night.

Until next time for the rest of this story!