Not Much Adventure

Northwoods Journal

Friday, July 05, 2013

I forgot to bring the bird feeders in last night but thankfully the bears were not around.  And I guess I found the secret to sleeping soundly up here – get up at 4:15 a.m.!

Katy and Pete headed out just after 7 this morning.  They went up to Drummond Island to go Jeeping.  I guess Drummond Island has some of the best off-roading trails in the state of Michigan.  They bought a tent and are going to rough it camping overnight.  That means the granddoggers are staying with us.  The kids had hoped to get an earlier start, but our long day yesterday made it hard to get up at the crack of dawn.  Of course, once they got up and around the dogs also got up and around which meant sleeping in was over for everybody.

I made Mark a blueberry streusel coffee cake for breakfast.  Martha White and I are very good friends! LOL  We had our coffee and cake at the kitchen table and got to see a few birds.  The hairy woodpeckers found the suet and a few blue jays showed up so I put some seeds and peanuts on the platform feeder.

After breakfast we headed out to do some garage saling.  We saw a deer at the corner of our road and M33.  After we turned on 33 going north, there was a big painted turtle crossing the road.  Mark pulled over and got out to carry it the rest of the way across.  He said he was making up for the one he ran over the last time we came up.  We meandered our way across to Hillman stopping at about a dozen sales.  The day was beautiful, although later Mark complained that it was too hot.  (It got up in the mid-80’s.)  On the way back we drove by a couple of places that we knew were listed for sale. It is looking less and less likely that we will sell our place because everything else on the market in our price range is trashy!  Mark came across Brush Creek Truck Trail and stopped in an area where we have picked a lot of blueberries in past years but we didn’t see hardly any at all.  Very disappointing!

We ate our lunch out on the deck – saw a pileated woodpecker about 75 yards back in our jungle – and then Mark messed with a few of the windows.  Several of the cranks are broken and he wanted to see if he could switch out the hardware from a couple of the windows that we don’t open.  Feeling sluggish from the heat, I ended up lying down on the sofa and falling asleep.

Late in the afternoon we decided to try and take the five dogs for a short walk.  Roxie was so hilarious.  She will chase the ball 23 hours a day if you let her, but she hates walkies! 

Roxie hates walkies!

The minute we got out her harness and leash her ears drooped and she tried to hide.  I wish I could have gotten a picture of the look on her face, it was so funny.  Schnitzel loves walks and tries her hardest to keep up with the big beagle dogs.   We didn’t go far, just up Steven’s Spring to the two-track that goes back to the lake and walked that to the gas field and then turned around and came back.  It was too hot to go all the way to the lake.  Schnitzel’s tongue was hanging down to the ground by time we got back.  (Well, she has really short legs, so I guess ‘down to the ground’ isn’t really that far!)

When we got back, Mark started the grill and we decided to have a game of Scrabble out on the porch.  Scrabble, a glass of sweet white wine, some fancy cheese and The Marshall Tucker Band playing – what more could a person ask for?  The only negative was that a thousand ATV’s and motorcycles kept roaring down our road.  The county has yet to brine the road – maybe due to all the logging going on farther up from us – so every ATV that flew by left a choking cloud of dust in its wake.  We were able to eat out dinner outside, even though the mosquitoes nearly drove us indoors.  We just barely broke 600 on our combined scores, so the Scrabble game was nothing to brag about.  We didn’t even have any 7-letter words!  We are fairly competitive when it comes to Scrabble and keep a tally sheet with our highest one-word scores, personal best scores, highest combined scores, etc.  Our highest two-person score up here is 921, so you can see why a 600 point game is pretty ho-hum for us.

Our mediocre Scrabble game.

The dogs were literally driving us crazy so after dinner we decided to escape for a little while and went into town for a scoop of ice cream at the sweet shoppe.  We took a little drive and Mark stopped near the headwaters of the Thunder Bay River (by Lake 15) and let me wade. 

The humble headwaters of the Thunder Bay River

I remember swimming at this little swimming hole when I was a kid.  There was not much wildlife to be seen, probably due to all the ATV’s out in the woods, but we did see a porcupine along our road.  They are so fast, I’ve given up trying to get pictures!

Dishes were waiting upon our return.  Thankfully it seems to be cooling off now that the sun has set.  We are heating up more water for washing ourselves and then it will be off to bed.  I guess this has been a fairly adventure-less day here in the northwoods!

Doxies all worn out from a day with grandma.