Jon, Amelia, and I left Waterford around 7am. We made it to the cabin by 1pm. The overriding philosophy of the trip was REDDER (rest-eat-drink-drink-eat-rest) which we managed to stick to admirably.
When we arrived the cabin was in pretty good shape. Since Jon
had spent a lot of time working on the refrigerator on a
previous trip he was
able to get it fired up pretty quickly. As you can see we had
it well stocked (ok, so it takes a while to cool down and the
rest of the stuff was still in the coolers).
Vittoria arrived the next day. She made it clear from the beginning how much Matt was missed on this trip. She had a harrowing trip into the cabin. It decided to start raining while she was driving in on the dirt roads. In fact it started pouring turning the road into a river. Since she wasn't driving her truck she had to turn back (as she originally started coming in from south). We met her coming in from town and managed to make it back out to the cabin. The storm front never seemed to push too far south and east into the woods so much of the trip was over dry roads. Vittoria brought up a new game that we played throughout the day (notice all the phases of redder in action). At times it got rather silly even with the stern face looking down on us from above (though that won't be a problem anymore, read on). In the end Amelia won and Vittoria started doing much better when she was half asleep and not paying attention to the moves she was making.
We didn't spend all of our time inside. We took a trip out to the Grand Sable Dunes and Falls. Vittoria and I went for a little run at first while Jon and Amelia looked around. We eventually met up at the falls.
We also took a short kayak trip on the Fox river (I did NOT take my camera). We were a little worried at first since the outfitters told us stories about people tipping and a kayak being lost. It turns out the river was pretty tame and the group who had all the problems was a bunch of teenagers (figures).
Most of the days were pretty warm (ok, hot) so we spent a lot of time in town swimming in the bay. Even though this is a bay, this is still Lake Superior so the water was COLD. The first day we went in you could stand in the water for a few seconds before your feet hurt because of the cold. Still, it was quite hot so it was very refreshing to jump in, ``swim'', for upwards of 10 seconds, then get out. It felt great as you warmed back up again. After the front came through it stayed quite warm at the cabin it was cool in town. In fact, driving into town from the cabin once we got out of the woods near the top of the hill the temperature dropped by at least 10 degrees (F) over a short distance. The one day we went into town to eat by the bay the air was much cooler than it had been on the previous days. Furthermore the water was at least as cold as on the first day we went in. Yet, as you can see, some people were still out there swimming (Jon and I did too of course).
After all that activity it was clearly time for more redder which we somehow managed to fit in to our busy schedule.
This was the first time I had gone up this early. The bugs were worse than I had expected. The black flies were not too bad, but the mosquitoes were quite bad. Too many of them managed to get into the cabin. This was particularly bad at night since it was so warm. We all ended up with many bites. Even Amelia who was smart enough to bring her ``contraption'', plenty of mosquitoes were able to get in and chomp on her too. If we go up again at this time we will have to find a way to prevent the mosquitoes from feasting so much.
Amelia and Vittoria left early in the morning. So early, in fact, I only vaguely remembering it happening. Jon and I stuck around for a little while longer to close the place up. We also took measurements of the kitchen in preparation for all the work will have to do (next year) replacing the walls. On the way back south we stopped for a swim in the balmy (not just in comparison to Superior) Lake Michigan. The trip back fortunately was uneventful.
|
craig@copi.org
Valid CSS