Summer Holidays

I’m back from my summer vacation: a week in Kenora with my family: lots of swimming and time to visit relatives and old friends.

No trip home would be complete without a trip to the local Dairy Queen: we arrived before they opened so we took a walk down to a nearby beach. It was covered in geese: which looked nice from afar… but a closer look revealed it was also covered in goose crap. So we’ll stick to the “from afar” photo:

I was in town with my sister and her friend Vicki: who were trying to hide behind trees while I was taking photos at the beach, but I managed to get them:

My grandparents had 7 guests at their camp… all family+relations from their long-time friends in Manitoba. Here we all are piled onto the picnic table for a group photo:

My cousin Randi, her husband Tyler, and their daughter Madison also made it. Here they are coming back in from a cruise around the lake:

Really good friends of my grandparents let me take their quad for a ride again (thanks Fred!) and a took a few trips into the bush and back. Once was to maintain my geocache, because it had disappeared. The cache is called “Deer Tracks” because… well… it’s in a mud hole full of deer tracks:

I also got to take my mom for a ride: we explored back to my cache and other trails in the area. Here we are turned around at a dead-end at a beaver dam, and pictures of what most of the trail was like:

We also made it back to a lake called Greenwater where there’s always boats stored by fishermen, and snowmobile trails in the winter. Here’s the boat launch area, a picture of the beaver dam, and a view back down the creek to another lake called Rosina (I once stepped off a snowmobile driving on that creek and went right through the ice):

We also stopped at a semi-maintained-but-back-in-the-bush campsite on a lake called Little Pickerel:

On the way back my mom mentioned that there was usually a snowmobile trail from a local road onto Little Pickerel in the winter. It was easy to find, and I decided to try to drive out to the lake (against my mothers protests: “Let me off!”). It looked like the first few feet of the trail was covered in a couple inches of mud. Actually it was a couple inches of dirt, twigs, and weeds floating over deep ruts filled with water. We sank in immediately. Oops!

It took a bit of maneuvering to get out:

In the end we made it home safe: no worse for wear other than soggy shoes and pants soaked in mud up to the knees. I also saw a few deer while driving around: but only one stood still to have his picture taken:

My good friend James came out to visit with his wife Tonya and children Matthew and Madison. We ended up taking a quad ride together near midnight… and at one point came to a stop at the edge of Trout Lake where the trail ended. My eyes were adjusted to the headlights of my quad, and I could only see the lights of his quad beside me. I heard him rustling around over the rumble of the machines and decided to snap a photo of him sitting there. Well… when the flash went off I didn’t get the picture I was expecting.

Why risk stumbling into the bush in total darkness when nature calls… when the racks of the quad give a stable surface from which to leave your mark? I learn something new every time I go back to Kenora!