Canada

Here's a post I wrote on the way home from Canada but never published:

We had beautiful weather in Canada. It was a little warm but not awful. I spent a lot of time wading in the lake to cool off. I took lots of video and I'm working on editing it into a production for people to see. I still need to add pictures and maybe try to put some text into it if I can. We caught fish for dinner two days. It is difficult to find fish this time of year. Walleye is so yummy!

I packed enough entertainment for a week of rain but we had a week of sunshine. Consequently I didn't work on my afghan at all. But I did make a catnip stuffed mouse and a stuffed dog bone, I made a sweater for Cyrus the yorkie, I identified lots of the trees around camp, and I hiked around a lot. It was a good week.

FIL taught me about camp maintenance and boat motors and I took video. I'm pretty confident we can do the whole trip on our own next year, provided we have enough money. There are lots of ways to save, but gas is still a killer. It is 2500 miles round trip, not including gas for the boats and generator. It looks like we'll end up taking our car which gets 25mpg but that's still a pretty penny. We can take the train to camp instead of the float plane and that'll be $200 instead of $1200. We can camp or stay with friends on the way up and back instead of hotels. Hotels won't take Tuvok anyway. 80lb limit on pets. So yeah, we're excited about next year.

We're on the way home today. I'm making Tuvok a wool jacket for winter. He barely has any fur underneath and he gets cold if he has to stay outside for very long (and he's not playing). I found fisherman's wool from lion brand yarn on clearance for half price and I found a pattern on ravelry.com for larger dogs. I'm modifying it a little but I think it'll work nicely. I hope he isn't afraid of it. He's such a weenie.

I miss my dog...

Also, Caribou Coffee is a wonderful place. They should replace all the Starbuckses.

I attached a picture of where our camp is. We drive to Sioux Lookout in the bottom left and fly about 20 minutes to the purple dot. Middle of nowhere Canada is the best place in the world!

On the road

I just learned that you need to save the blog draft in Blogger+ before doing anything else. I'm spoiled with the new-fangled computers autosaveing.

Anyway. We're on our way to Canada with the in-laws. We just passed Des Moines. There's water falling out of the sky. I seem to have some vague, distant memory of that happening in Oklahoma. Maybe someday it'll happen there again.

So far I've made Cyrus the yorkie a sweater. He was acting cold last night so this morning I made one from some of the random yarn I brought along. It looks pretty good. I went to ravelry.com and got a bunch of patterns to play with. They're saved on the iPad. This iPad thing is pretty cool.

I have a video app so I can record how to do stuff in Canada like fix boat motors and hook up the propane fridge. I hope that next year we can go on our own. Also, it'll be nice to show people what it's like in camp. When we go by ourselves we can take Tuvok with us. They think he's too big. Oh well. He's having fun with his friend Jersey this week.

The fall flowers are blooming in Iowa. There are lots of coreopsis and rudbeckia still from the summer but the sunflowers and goldenrods are making quite a show on the side of the highway. The cattails are fluffy too. Every so often there's a stand of tall purple asters. Makes me want to stop and pick a bouquet. Back home the only fall flowers are snow-on-the-mountain. It's too dry for the others this year so far. Maybe if it rains they'll show up.

I've always wondered why the dominant flower color changes as the seasons progress. In the spring there are pinks and blues and purples and they give way to more yellows and oranges in the summer and fall. Do the pollinators change? Obviously you can find just about every color in every season, but the yellow is so dominant in fall and practically nonexistent in spring. Hmm.

We'll be in Cloquet, Minnesota by the time I get to post this so I'll just add to it if I feel like talking during the day.

----------

Ok, we're in Cloquet. They have wild yellow snapdragons here. The goldenrods and asters are really gorgeous. I wonder if those things will be growing at camp too.

It's only 6:20. We could make it several hundred miles further but oh well. That's one of the reasons we want to go on our own next time. We can drive the 26 hours the way we want instead of in such short spurts. At least the hotel has wi-fi.

It is cool here. I was helping FIL re-ice the coolers and I almost needed a long sleeved shirt. Even with my new thyroid pills making me hot and being in desperate need of a shower which, oddly, makes me hot too. The hotel has a shower (yay).

DH is listening to the first OSU game against Louisiana. We're winning by a lot, which is expected. Tomorrow we hit the road at 6:30 and should make it to Sioux Lookout a little after lunch. Then its a 15 minute float plane ride to the camp.

Happy smiley faces will ensue.

Here's a picture of the rain in Iowa.