WE HAD TO LEAVE THE ISLAND | Off Grid Cabin Life // EFRT S7 EP40

Welcome to another episode of The Epic Family Road Trip! Hey guys, we have left the island for a day, maybe two max. What we're doing is going down to the big city, to the U.S. consulate in Toronto. So that's our nearest U.S. consulate and we're doing some, we have a meeting with them for the dual citizenships for some of us. They're all in various stages. We also had to apply for two Canadian passports, renew a couple of driver's licenses, and hit a barber shop for a much needed haircut for the boys. In the meantime we have about a four hour, four and a half hour drive getting down. We're gonna go see my brother, maybe spend the night there camping on his property, and then after that it's an hour and a half to downtown. We've got to be there early, so it's going to be an early morning tomorrow. We're just pulling in at my brother James's place and all the kids are outside all excited to see us and we're excited to see them. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're camping here tonight. We have a big beautiful extended family here in Ontario and it will definitely take more than one day to reconnect with everyone. It was so wonderful to meet up with our family again and as the evening progressed more and more cousins showed up to say hi. Up early the next day we head down to the city on what would end up being several days of very early morning lineups and appointments. And we are very happy to say that we got all our paperwork renewed. Our last stop before heading back to the cabin is a very special visit to our Oma and Opa on Oma's 79th birthday. We enjoyed a beautiful visit with our wonderful grandparents and we look forward to many more fun times together this summer. Happy 79th birthday Oma. We love you. After a short but wonderful visit we were excited to get back up north where we were greeted by some of the local wildlife. So that was pretty exciting. Caroline and I were just coming back and there was a black bear on pretty slow on these back roads and because there seems to be always wildlife but what a beauty black bear super excited to see it. Mom has been looking at a baking table for her kitchen for some time but after making a few calculations she figured that if we were to make it ourselves we could buy the wood and some of the tools for the same price as the store-bought table. In the spirit of resourcefulness and learning to be more self-reliant we gave it a try and ended up with a very nice addition to mom's kitchen. One of our favorite ways to connect with nature and get a bit of exercise at the same time is to paddle a canoe around the island. The canoe has played a very important and historic role in Canadian history. Originally the indigenous people of Canada traveled across the endless rivers and lakes using their beautiful handcrafted birch bark canoes. Years later the fur traders and explorers adapted the canoe to carry them through the vast wilderness in search of the beaver pelts that helped establish the nation of Canada. Canoeing is still the preferred method of travel in the backcountry here where they can be portaged into the rivers and lakes that motorized boats cannot get access to. Hey guys it is Wednesday evening and it is not all work on the island we do take some time to have fun and right now we're heading out for a bit of a fishing trip. It's a gorgeous evening not a cloud in the sky the sun's going down in the background and hopefully we'll hook a couple of fish and see what we get. Just pull like right into the spot where we climb up to jump. Yeah nice. Hey there's bass here. Nice one. Yeah nice smallmouth. If I can get bigger. Oh that was a decent little uh small one. Ah he came off. No that was a good one. Oh man. All right we've got a bunch of smallmouth bass had a lot of fun we just released them this time here we just catch and release but uh in this lake we have mostly smallmouth bass there's some largemouth in kind of the reed swampy areas and then we've got a good uh bunch of lake trout but they like to sit really deep so you either have to troll for those or jig really deep I'd say sometimes 100 feet 75 feet even deeper 150 feet and that's where the big lake trout are. When we when we're going for food actual fish that we can smoke we go for the lake trout but right now we're just having fun catching some smallmouth bass and these wild bass up here these Ontario bass they fight like crazy they can only be that big but they'll feel like they're that big so it's a lot of fun. It's getting dark now so we're gonna head back make a little fire. All right so while we head back we're just through a line out we're gonna be trolling for some pike there's some pretty big pike in this lake dad caught a few big ones last time we were up probably won't catch anything but it's uh worth a shot. Good morning guys we are going to head into town today as you see in the background we've been using my brother's boat our boat is fine with the outboard motor we have a two-stroke mercury needs some repairs and over the years it's kind of become a little bit unreliable so we're gonna go and take a look at getting a new outboard hopefully we can find a good deal and find one available we'll take you with us and let you know how it goes. Yeah you got the paddle? Yep but now I'm on you so you're good. All right we just dropped off the boat at Legend Boats and we took a look at the brand new engines which by the way are unavailable anywhere um they've been they ordered they have about nine engines on order of the size we were looking at 30 horsepower um but they ordered them last August and still nothing so it's crazy we even looked at Yamaha he said the same thing so on both of them we've been on their waiting list for like two years and uh no no action so but we heard the best news ever um our little two-stroke 30 horse mercury is a really good engine and the guy came out and he said whatever you do don't get rid of this thing they'll they're gonna try to fix it up replace the carburetor a few minor things hopefully that's all it is and whatever it is we'll end up with our good old original merc and those things it should have 10 years more in it or even more and we've learned how to do all the maintenance on it and everything so we're pretty excited that might be our solution besides the new engines are insanely expensive in the last two years since we looked before we left on our last trip they were $2,000 cheaper so now to get a 30 horse on our boat would cost about $12,000 to get a 25 horse four stroke on our boat would cost $10,000 so it's prohibitive and uh i was sitting there not knowing what to do but now i'm leaving with a lot of hope that we can get our original boat going for a couple hundred bucks we could be back in the water so stay tuned we'll let you know what happens all right we're back at the lake we uh after the boat fights we went got groceries and uh now we've loaded up the boat we're heading into the cabin it takes almost well basically it takes a full day to go get groceries so we are very careful to plan properly and then we try to do it maximum once a week but i'm trying to get down to being able to go grocery shopping every two weeks and that's why we're working so hard to get things properly put away in our freezer vacuum sealed and all that so that we can have our own supplies as much as possible we'll take off and try to lead you away they fly right over top and then when you get far enough away they go back oh yes yes good to see you good to see you good to see you you want to play ball when we were back in the city we were dismayed to find out that our favorite caribbean restaurant soul live had closed its doors so while mom and dad are out canoeing i am going to make everyone a delicious roti make sure to join us next week as we explore some of the history of this place and learn from the legacy of those who built these cabins how to be more self-reliant back in their day this lake was only accessible by float plane so they had to be very resourceful and skilled in off-grid food storage and other survival techniques we will also embark on probably our biggest project yet restoring the antique cold storage cabins that have fallen into disrepair back to their intended use all right so this cabin here is a old underground cold storage that the original owners of this place would have built it would have dug it all out and then built this entire amazing scandinavian scribe like just about every other cabin that's here really detailed uh good work so it's lasted a really long time for being half buried in the ground but at this point it's fallen into disrepair but we're updating a lot of the old stuff because how they did it in the old days everything was self-sufficient this would make it where we can store vegetables in a cool place with absolutely no power needed which is your optimal situation when you're living off the grid and in the meantime we'll see you down the road