Yeah I hear you for sure man! I was a bit of a strange blend as a kid, played a lot of video games but also was outside a lot compared to some of my other friends! We were really lucky and that we had a large forest near my parents house so I was always out there exploring, messing around and just going for some nice hikes. Some of my best exploration memories are out there doing that stuff! I want to share that for sure with my son, he's got an incredible adventure spirit which I love. He's always down for some type of outdoor adventure so I've got a little partner for the stuff that's for sure! One thing I don't know a whole lot about is wild edibles. I want to grab a book on them for the local area we live in. We've looked up some of the plants around us and have gotten familiar with some names that aren't exactly household names like Catalpa trees among others. Next is to figure out besides Plantain, what is around us that we can eat! Lol
I think next on our list at some point this fall is going to be camping. I've never put up a tent before lol so it will be a fun experience! We have a family members house that we can go to with a yard that's right on a lake. It's perfect and one of the ideal spots to do a first camp, safe and pretty controlled.
Ah the canoe was a decent one. I've only been on a canoe a couple times, we had an aluminum boat when I was a kid so that's what we would use but I went out on a canoe on a river a couple times. It was a lot of fun for sure but it does get a little dangerous at some points! There was this guy on a boat who was clearly an asshole. He saw us, waved to us but then proceeded to make giant fucking waves and almost knocked the canoe over! I was scared as shit, we had our life jackets on which was good but I didn't want to dump all my shit in the lake lol
Where I grew up was pretty amazing. A little over an hour from Toronto but no cable, cell phones, etc. We were completely surrounded by nature, creeks and lakes full of fsh, woods full of wild foods. Where you are, it is a treasure trove of wild foods. There's a guy from New York named Steve "Wildman" Brill that has an excellent book and there would be a lot of the same foods you would have there. You probably have fiddleheads, morels, puffballs and literally hundreds of other foods growing there.
We used to have assholes like that on our lake and they thought it was great fun to swamp canoes. We got them once though. I saw the police launching their boat and I asked them to wait and watch us when we went into the bay. The law is that smaller craft always have the right of way so I knew those kids, well they were older than I was but probably 18-19 at the time, would be coming right over when they saw us in the canoe. Within 20 minutes they were doing circles around us and before we got swamped, the cops came flying over and got them for not only trying to capsize us but they had weed, booze and fireworks in the boat, which were all illegal and then the guy driving got an impaired. It was pretty sweet justice because they had flipped us over probably ten times over the two summers.