A Day to Live For

Northwoods Journal

Monday, July 7, 2014

The radio announcer, when discussing the weather this morning, called today a “day to die for” – weather-wise. I thought this was a bit morbid and prefer to think of it as a day to live for.

The weather was very nice; mostly sunny, some clouds, but a bit humid. The mosquitoes sure came out after last night’s storm!

We had plenty to keep us busy all morning. Mark loaded the pieces of the old metal shed onto the trailer and hauled it up to the end of the driveway. Just in time, the scrap metal guy came and got it, along with a pile of other old metal junk. Then Mark tore down the old outhouse that we haven’t used in several years. The end of an era! Wow, that end of the trailer looks so much better now without the old shed or outhouse!

I spent the morning on household chores – dusting, vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms, shaking out the rugs, etc. I always like to do those things our last day here so that next time we come up things are clean(ish) – this is a cabin, you know. 🙂

Finally I put on my hiking boots and we took the dogs for their last hike of the weekend. Mark drove back down Blue Jay Trail to the area we hiked a couple of days ago. There are so many trails that criss-cross that area, we’ll probably never hit them all. He drove up the power lines until he found a place where a trail cut off into the woods.

The FJ ready for what it does best – climbing hills!

We had a pleasant hike up and down dale and were able to make a complete circle, which always makes the dogs happy. For some reason they are never happy with turning around and going back the way we came.  I guess they figure they already sniffed those sniffs!

A quiet trail.

Along the power lines I took a couple of photos of these puff ball things that look like giant dandelion fluffs. I don’t remember the name of them. They have a really pretty pattern inside.

 

I think my favorite wildflowers are the wood lilies. What’s interesting is that we only see them growing in one area of Blue Jay trail. There are a one or two right along the trail, then a few in a meadow up the power lines just to the north of the trail.

Wood lily

Wood lily

It was well after lunchtime when we got back so we ate leftover cold pizza and macaroni salad. Then it was time to start packing up and putting everything away. It was funny because last night Mark had told our friends that we would, “probably leave around 2:30” and we pulled out of our driveway right on the dot of 2:30! We may make a quick weekend trip up in a couple of weeks and then we have our long vacation to Vermont so won’t be back in the northwoods for awhile!

As a postscript to yesterday’s adventure in Pigeon River, we were anxious to get home and pull up Google earth and see exactly where we were. It took Mark awhile to track it down, but he finally pinpointed exactly where we had been and how we got “lost”. The road we had driven in on curved west – which is partly how we got so confused because we both had thought we were going north. So, that explains how we got so far west of where we started. It was interesting to see all those little tan lines squiggling through the forest!

Also, I asked him to find Blue Lakes and see if there were really lakes back in there, so he did and yes, there are lakes back there but where we were hiking wasn’t anywhere near them! From the satellite view we couldn’t figure out how you would access those lakes at all.