Wednesday, July 8, did indeed turn out to be a gorgeous Ahmic day.  It began auspiciously enough with a pancake breakfast eaten under overcast skies.  After this feast, Diane and I swept and vacuumed the main cabin.  Much of the rest of the morning was taken up with various maintenance activities, consisting of everything from cleaning the Wigger’s porch to scraping crud off of a guesthouse doc, but I must admit that most of the morning and afternoon are a complete blank to me.

Sometime during the afternoon, the owner of the peahen was located and he arrived at the camp with a hastily-constructed trap for the animal – basically a large wire cage which had been jury-rigged with a mousetrap  (on the outside of the cage), which supposedly  would be triggered by the bird tugging at some grapes inside the cage, causing a stick to be pulled out from under the cage door, thus trapping the peahen (alternately known as Francis by the women in the camp and Cher by me) and allowing her to be safely transported back to the farm where she belongs.

This, of course, did not work.  After watching it for 30 minutes or so, I decided to go for a walk and the bird’s owner decided to leave the trap overnight and go home.

I didn’t see anything overly interesting on my walk, which led me down Langford Lane to the Billy Rouse camp; but did take a number of road shots.  I don’t know why I’m so fascinated with roads, but I am.  Deal with it.

Upon my return from the walk, I trudged to my boathouse home with the intention of taking a nap.  Don Peddie had other ideas.  I became aware of these when he came charging towards the boathouse, saw me on the balcony, and screamed, “Get your biggest lens and come with me!  There are loons on the lake!”

Being an old loon hand, I wasn’t overly excited, but Don was; so I decided to humor him.  Good call on my part.  He’d found two adult loons and a chick – something I haven’t seen before.  I learned later that there were actually two chicks, but I only saw the one.  That was enough for me, and I ended up taking about 80 pictures of the three birds.  We then screamed back to the camp, where Don exchanged me for Julie and took off again, apparently opening a new “Peddie Nature Cruises” company or something.

After the loon excursion, I ran into Cy and T, who were just about to hit the tennis court – something I’d wanted to do since last weekend, so I horned my way into their game.  We played several sets of Canadian doubles (rotating 2-against-1); and, for the first time that I can remember, I actually won.  Final score was 4 for me, 3 for T and 2 for Cy.  My plan is to never ever ever never ever let T forget it.

Flush with my victory, I ran to the main cabin to fulfil my duties as assistant cook for Karl.  He didn’t really need my help as he threw together a fantastic creamed corn casserole to go along with a very cool “salad” (tomatoes with mozzarella slices, basil, oil and vinegar), and the main course of chicken breasts grilled in the big green egg.  For dessert, he came up with grapes mixed with sour cream, which were topped with cinnamon, brown sugar, and triple sec.  Good stuff.

After dinner activities were fairly tame.  The ladies worked on the puzzle for a while before a game of team cribbage broke out.  I spent the evening getting my butt kicked in Dominion (an online card game).

Then it was off to bed for us all, where we fell asleep listening to the laughter of the loons.

Next up:  Thursday! 

TWD

Yeah, baby!  The moon was HUGE over the Rouse’s boathouse last night!

Okay…of course the picture over there is photoshopped.  I think it looks pretty cool anyway, and it is indeed made up of two photos that I took on Monday night.  The shot of the moon was actually sort of fun.  I set my camera to the “bulb” setting, which means that the shutter will stay open for as long as my finger is on the button.  In order to cut down on vibration, I also used a remote shutter-release cable; and to cut down on the vibration caused by the shutter itself, I turned off off the lights in the boathouse, held a magazine over the front of my camera’s lens (camera was on a tripod), opened the shutter, waited for several seconds (in order to let the shutter-caused vibrations stop), and then quickly moved the magazine away from the lens and then back in front of it (picture Matthew Brady taking pictures during the civil war).  It took quite a few attempts, but I finally started to get the timing down, resulting in the fairly clean moon image that I used for the above manipulation.

You’ve got to admit that it’s more interesting than the actual shot of the Rouse boathouse, which came out like this:

 
Anyway,  back to the narrative.  Monday did indeed start out to be sort of a blah day, weatherwise.  It rained in the early morning (before I was awake) and then turned quite cool.  Cy, “T,” Karl, Diane, Don and Julie decided to head to nearby Huntsville to do some shopping and act like tourists.  I opted to hang out at Camp Ulvik, largely because I slept until nearly 10 and the old folks were ready to leave by the time I made my way to the cabin.

After treating myself to a hot shower (because of the cool air, I couldn’t convince myself to jump in the lake), I walked for about 45 minutes with my camera, hoping that some enterprising wild thing would be out and about in the overcast day.  The only thing I saw were mosquitoes, who happily ate away at my ears, neck, hands and any other exposed skin they could find.  When it started to rain, I headed back towards the camp probably more quickly than I had to, considering the fact that my camera was quite safe inside a plastic bag.

I spent most of the rest of Monday afternoon sitting on the Wigger’s porch and chatting on my computer.  The old folks got home shortly before cocktail hour (the hour or two preceding dinner), and Don happily started a fire in the main cabin’s large fireplace.  When I say it was “cool,” perhaps I should define what I mean.  It was in the high 40s.  A fire was quite welcome.

Dinner, put together by “T” and Julie, was barbequed pork ribs, leftover chickpea stuff, and some sort of salad; and was – by and large – not bad.  I have this thing about messy food, though:  I don’t eat much of it.  It’s too much work, much like peel-n-eat shrimp.  So later, after the old folks had all gone to bed (no cards or anything Monday, due largely to the fact that T’s sister and brother-in-law showed up after dinner), I sort of gorged on peanuts while playing on my computer and listening to Chicago Public Radio.  I did this until the fire had died away and mosquitoes began invading the main cabin, then headed to my bug-free boathouse, where I slept like a brick.

Tuesday was warmer than Monday, but the rain really arrived.  “T” and Don went out fishing after breakfast (I was invited, but really didn’t feel like getting soaked), and the skies opened up while they were gone.  I spent the morning playing on my computer and looking at pictures while Karl looked at his fantasy baseball stats and the ladies in the camp combined their efforts on the jigsaw puzzle (which is currently about 85% done, but is still incredibly difficult).

The happy fishermen got back by noon or so – drenched and fishless – and Don immediately got to work building a fire.  Since I still had no Canadian money and  since the rain showed no sign of stopping and since it was getting extremely crowded (and, might I add, LOUD) inside the cabin, I decided that a drive to Parry Sound was in order.  Actually, I decided that a drive to anywhere was in order, and originally started towards Burke’s Falls and/or Huntsville before literally turning around in someone’s driveway and heading the opposite direction to Parry Sound, which is located on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay.

The village of Parry Sound (birthplace and current hometown of Bobby Orr for the sports fans among you) is dominated two things: a town dock and a railroad trestle.  The trestle is the longest in Ontario (something like 1,700 feet long) and celebrated its 100th anniversary last June.

The town dock is a public dock run by the Parry Sound chamber of commerce and can accomodate just about any size boat.  Anybody who can afford the docking fee can dock there and it’s not uncommon to see a normal ski-boat moored with a $10M yacht on one side and a tall ship on the other.  The dock is also the point of departure for about three different cruise companies, all of which take passengers out among the thousands of islands in the Georgian Bay, stop for lunch at one of the islands with a restaurant, and then come back.  In the last 20 years or so that I’ve been coming to Ahmic, I’ve taken these tours three times – twice on a tugboat called “Cambrian,” and once on a larger cruise boat named “Island Princess.”  I prefer the tugboat, but kind of hate to waste an entire day out on the bay.

The village of Parry Sound itself is, unfortunately, rather hokey.  There’s an excellent used book store there – I spend an hour or so there every time I visit the village – and a couple of touristy knick-knack stores, but (I remembered this too late) Huntsville is an infinitely better place for picking up souvenirs.  The weather was pleasant enough, however, so I spent most of the afternoon hanging out on the dock, visiting the book store and sifting through the aforementioned tacky stuff before heading back to Ahmic.  Upon arrival, I fired up the computer, caught up on Facebook and chatted with a friend in Macon while Karl and Julie threw together some truly amazing hamburgers along with something that I assumed was beet greens, but have since been informed was actually Swiss Chard (never heard of it).

The sky during dinner indicated that Wednesday might be a beautiful day.

For whatever reason, last night’s after-dinner activity became “Inside Vermont Politics,”  the game wherein “T” and Karl  throw out stories about anything local to Vermont and Di and Cy and Don and (to a much lesser extent) Julie attempt to comment on those items before “T” or Karl loudly change to a completely different subject.  It is a common game, often played at Ulvik, and I admit that I’m not very good at it, as it contains very little of interest to me.  So I hung in there for only an hour or so (Julie didn’t even do that much, as you can see) and then waddled to my boathouse to, once again, have a wonderful and restful sleep.

More tomorrow or Friday.

TWD

Well, it’s about 12:30 AM on Monday, July 6th, 2009, and I guess I should get started on what I’ve been doing on my vacation so far. Not a great deal to tell, but experience has taught me that if I don’t put the stuff down – minutiae as well as anything of import – I’ll forget it all before I get the chance to sit down and write about it.

Early on Friday morning (the 3rd), I got myself and all of my necessary belongings packed into the Audi and hit the road – exactly at 5AM, which – oddly enough – had been my plan. I had a pleasant drive of a bit over ten hours and checked into my hotel in Maumee, OH (just outside of Toledo) at somewhere between 3 and 3:30 on Friday. On Friday night, I made good on a promise I’d made to myself about 10 years ago and had dinner at Tony Packo’s Famous Hot Dogs in Toledo proper. Dinner consisted of a plate of Tony’s chili cheese mac, about which I had heard very good things, along with one of the aforementioned famous hot dogs.

Tony’s was founded in the 1920s by a Hungarian who apparently thought his version of the all-American dog was the best in the world. Apparently, Toledoans liked the things enough to allow Mr. Packo to stay in business until the 1970’s, when an actor from Toledo named Jamie Farr ad libbed a few lines in an episode of a little known situation comedy called “M*A*S*H and said something about how the best hot dogs in Toledo came from a place called Tony Packo’s. The writers of M*A*S*H liked the reference so much that Packo’s was written into about 4 more episodes (in one, the sausage casings from TP’s are shipped to Korea to be used in a heart/lung machine or something); and, virtually overnight, Tony Packo’s morphed from a local spot where Toledoans in search of a dog went into eat to a full-blown tourist attraction where rich and famous people go to eat hot dogs and (I’m not making this up) autograph hot dog buns – hundreds of which are prominently displayed on the walls of the two or three Tony Packo’s restaurants now in business in the Toledo area. Being a purist, I went to the ORIGINAL Tony Packo’s, of course.

The highly-touted chili cheese mac was…well…it was okay. I think it might have been better had I doused it liberally with hot sauce, but it wasn’t bad. Sort of bland, if I’m to be totally honest, but not disgusting or anything. And the world-famous dog? I’d give it a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. For starters, it wasn’t a hot dog. It was more like a kielbasa. And it was cut in half. Rather tough, somewhat pungent. I opted to have it covered in the (world famous, naturally) Tony Packo’s hot dog chili, which helped it tremendously; but, like I said, I’m a purist. I wanted a hot dog, not a kielbasa covered in chili.

The PICKLES, however, were extraordinary. Thick-cut dills which had been marinating with peppers and had a fantastic zing to them. I bought a jar of them before leaving the place and had some on my sandwiches at Ahmic this afternoon.

After dinner, it was back to the hotel by way of a meandering route (I was lost), which took me past First Third Field, home of the Toledo Mud Hens minor league baseball team. I must say that it’s a lovely little park nestled smack in the middle of downtown Toledo. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, actually. The field is surrounded by the city on all four sides from what I could tell, and it’s not so much in a stadium as in a sunken city block. Should one want to watch the Mud Hens play, one could literally do so by standing on the sidewalk (yes, seats are available – it looked like it could hold about 5000 paid spectators).

Back at the hotel, I played on the computer a bit and then crashed. Got up at around 10:00 Saturday morning (Independence Day), with a vague idea of checking out the Toledo Zoo, but I was sort of stoked about getting to Canada and opted to hit the road by about 11:30.

The drive from Toledo to Magnetawan was relatively uneventful. Customs was a breeze (“Where are you from? Where are you going? How long are you staying? Okay, have a nice day”), and the 401, 407 and 400 highways were all pretty traffic- and construction-free, which was nice. I did get stopped in a DUI checkpoint just outside of Parry Sound, but the OPP guy who talked to me was really more interested in my car than in anything else (“Nice wheels! You lease or buy? Drive good? You like it? Okay, have a nice day”). In spite of that short slow-down, I made it to Ulvik at shortly after 7:00 Saturday night and was greeted with hugs from Cy and “T”, Karl and Diane Neuse, and Don and Julie Peddie; all of whom I’ve spent time with previously. Dinner on Saturday, prepared by Dr. and Mrs. Peddie, was lamb, potato salad and corn on the cob.

A peahen (female peacock for the cretins among you) apparently took up residence at the camp a day or two after Cy and “T” got here last week, and she’s fairly tame. Diane has been feeding her cheerios, which the bird seems to enjoy, and putting water out for her – which she also appreciates. We were also treated to the arrival of a mother raccoon and 5 little balls of fur known as “baby raccoons” during dinner. I attempted to get some pictures of the babies – they were beyond cute – but didn’t do the best job of it. After dinner, the older crowd stayed up to play dominos, while I opted to take a quick jump in the lake and go to bed. I’m staying in the boathouse this year.

Woke up at around 8 this morning and had another lake-bath (complete with Dr. Bronner’s Magical Peppermint Soap), then walked up to see what was going on in the main cabin. Not much, as it turned out. The old folks were eating sticky buns and drinking coffee (I partook of the latter, turned my nose up at the former). After breakfast, Karl, Diane, Julie and Don took off to play golf, leaving Cy and “T” and I to listen to the Wimbledon finals (Federer beat Roddick in a fantastic match) and work on a devilishly difficult jigsaw puzzle that Diane apparently started a few days ago. I took a couple of photography walks later in the morning and spotted at least one fox (have not seen one of those here before) along with the aforementioned peahen, some deer tracks, about a jillion wildflowers, birds and the like.

The golfing foursome got back just in time for lunch, for which I had a couple of cheese sandwiches stuffed with, as previously mentioned, Tony Packo’s peppered pickes. Spent some time on the internet this afternoon chatting with a cute lady from back home and then took another walk (didn’t see anything more interesting than a couple of joggers who I didn’t recognize). Came back from the walk to find Karl, Cy and “T” batting balls around on the tennis court and opted to photograph them rather than participate.

Dinner, prepared by Diane and Cy, was comprised of a fantastic beet salad with feta cheese; a mixture beet greens and grilled chick peas; and fried turkey kielbasa with barbecue sauce – amazingly good.

Dr. Peddie retired shortly after dessert (strawberries, cherry pie and ice cream) and the remaining 6 of us played 10 games of Oh Hell. I was destroyed, naturally. Karl won. Also naturally.

That pretty much wrapped up the evening, and we all totterred off to our beds at around 10:30. I’ve spent the last 2 hours (before starting this) trying various ways to get network access in the boathouse (no luck there) and messing around with low-light and lunar photography (am making HUGE strides in those areas, I’m happy to say).

By the way, the weather today was phenomenal. I’d guess that the temperature hovered around 72, thanks in part to a wonderful western breeze coming off of the lake. Tomorrow (today) is still somewhat of a question mark as far as the weather goes; but if it looks like rain, we’re probably going to head into Parry Sound. All of us need some Canadian cash (I’m currently walking around with five American $100 bills, which I’m certainly not going to spend up here), and the Sound is always a nice place to grab a good lunch, browse in the used book store, pick up any necessary supplies, and buy touristy stuff. From what I understand, the rest of the week is supposed to be as gorgeous as it was today – no surprise there. It’s always beautiful at Ahmic, in my experience.

Guess I should try to grab some sleep now, since it’s 1:15. Will update this blog some more tomorrow night.

TWD