Feeling The Heat

Northwoods Journal

Sunday, June 23, 2013

I guess the meteorologist must have scratched off the “winning” lottery ticket because the forecast today ended up being accurate – we really did get up to 90 degrees.  Yesterday must have been the “losing” ticket because they were pretty far off base.  But then again, when you hear the weather up here it is usually for all of northern and mid-Michigan, so I guess I should cut them some slack.  It must be pretty hard to predict the weather for half of the state.

Our wake-up call this morning was someone doing target practice at the shooting range about 2 miles down the road.  I guess they figured 7 a.m. Sunday morning was as good a time as any to sight in that rifle.  I decided to go all gourmet for breakfast and made cranberry orange coffee cake from a box mix.  Hey, it tasted great with a fresh cup of coffee!  I don’t have a proper oven up here, so when I bake it’s done in the Oster toaster oven.  It gets the job done and doesn’t heat the whole place up.

I told Mark I wanted to walk the motorcycle trail where we’ve done a lot of blueberry picking in the past, so we headed over that way.  Saw one deer as we drove back to the trail.  There was plenty of birdsong to brighten our way, especially wood thrushes.  The blueberries are looking great so far.  I sure hope we get up here at the right time next month for picking.  There was a huge patch of these pretty pink flowers that we found out are sheep laurel, and some wild irises, too.

Sheep Laurel

 

Wild Iris

We came across a teeny-tiny baby snapping turtle in the middle of the trail.  I put a poplar leaf next to it to show some gauge of size.  Mark said it would have been better to put a quarter down but neither one of us had one in our pockets.

Baby Snapping Turtle

Later we had another deer dash across the trail in front of us.  Eventually the motocross trail intersects with an ATV trail and we could make a loop back to the meadow where we parked.  We were sweating by time we got there, even though we had only been walking for a little over an hour.

We came back to the cabin only long enough to drop off the dogs and freshen up a bit before heading into town to see our friend who owns the coffee house/art gallery.  We always like to get a cup of coffee (well, this time I had a peach smoothie) and talk politics or local gossip with him.  The Elk Country Cruisers were having a car show in Briley Township Park so we walked around the car show for a little while.  I fell in love with this 1958 Chevy truck – aqua blue, one of my favorite colors.

1958 Chevy Cameo

We just had time to get home – a doe and fawn ran across the road right in front of us just before we reached our driveway – and have a quick bite of lunch (cold pizza left over from yesterday) before the guy from the real estate office showed up.  He looked around our place and took some notes and said he will work up a CMA for us within the next couple of days.  We are meeting him tomorrow morning to go look at that cabin over in Vienna Corners.  After he left, Mark admitted that he had never really wanted to buy this place when we first looked at it all those years ago, and now he isn’t at all sure he wants to sell it.  I’m not sure, either.  There’s a lot to consider and if we can’t get enough out of it, it won’t happen anyway.

It was too hot to do much of anything and finally mid-afternoon Mark suggested we head to Hillman for ice cream at the Dairy Queen.  On the way we stopped by this lake where we had seen several places listed for sale at very good prices.  Well, we found out why.  The two places we were most interested in are very nice, but overall the area is so run down and dumpy.  The properties are very close together and most of them look like they need to be bulldozed down.  The one I liked the most had a nice deck right on the water and a pretty view, but Mark said that the run down neighborhood was a deal breaker for him.  We do like our seclusion here and aren’t willing to give it up, even for lakefront. (Especially not redneck lakefront.)

After our ice cream – I splurged and had a turtle sundae in a waffle bowl – we pretty much laid around in a heat-and-sugar-induced coma.  Not much bird activity again – just the hummingbirds and the hairy woodpeckers – but lots of pretty butterflies adding color to the day.  It was 7:30 before we even thought about dinner, we just had something light tonight – turkey sausages and fresh veggies.  After dinner we went for a drive to look for wildlife.  Mark drove up to Rouse Rd., up by the Elk Ridge Golf Course.  There were 2 deer right on Rouse Rd, one which almost had a close encounter with the FJ and nearly became venison.  Two more deer crossed farther along the road and then I thought I saw another deer but that turned out to be a mailbox. LOL  Look, I never claimed to have good eyesight.

We stopped and walked the dogs for a short way down this trail we are very familiar with.  It’s in an area with a lot of elk and as soon as we got out of the FJ we saw fresh elk tracks and some were little, baby elk tracks.  Of course, with two hounds on leash the chances of sneaking up on an elk herd undetected are pretty slim.  There was the lovely song of the hermit thrush echoing through the wood.  That song always puts a thrill in my heart!  The trail winds in and out of forest that gets very thick and murky.  The hermit thrush song was soon drowned out by three raucous crows who were not at all happy we were trespassing in their wood!  It was too hot and humid to walk for long but at least I felt like I burned/sweated off a little of that turtle sundae!

We know where almost all of the big rye fields are where you sometimes can see elk (but more oftentimes not) so Mark drove to several of them but we didn’t see a thing.  Okay, Mark swears he saw something that looked like a mink in one of them but I didn’t see it, and even if I had there’s the eyesight issue of mine so….  All together we saw 11 deer before getting back home at nearly 10 o’clock.

No night sounds.  I guess it’s too hot even for the owls or whip-or-wills.