This is one in an occasional series where I document my own version of the sovereign life — the small, mostly-free, mostly-unglamorous decisions that add up to a life you actually chose instead of one that happened to you. A week of family camping in Algonquin is one of them. None of this is advice. It’s just what the bush does to my head, and what it does for my kids.

Let me be honest about the part nobody prints on the brochure: a week of family camping in Algonquin is not a holiday. It’s a logistics project.