After two months in bed or, on good days, watching Hannah Montana, I started feeling markedly better sometime in August. That's when Greg came to have a problem on his hands. His wife decided she had an entire summer's worth of fun to make up, and she was determined to do it. This is how we ended up at Noah's Ark and Little Amerricka. But that was not enough. Not even Door County was enough!
No, now that I was back from the dead, I had a lot of living to do. And I decided it would be done on long weekends in the fall--in Colorado, Minneapolis, Chicago, South Dakota, Cincinnati, and various Wisconsin locales. As I was explaining all this to Greg--reminding him that I had been so BORED all summer and that this was our LAST CHANCE to travel without a diaper bag and/stroller for four years--he just looked at me. He may have said some words, but his look did most of the talking, and it said something like this:
"I am trying to write a dissertation here! On a really condensed schedule!! And I'm trying to get as far as possible before said baby, and I don't think I have to remind you what happens to you when we bring a baby home, so I really think it would be a good idea for me to get as much done as possible this fall, and that's really hard if we are never home!"
And I think he added:
"Also, our kids should probably go to school occasionally."
I pouted and whined (because I am really mature like that). And then I crossed everything off my list.
Except Eagle River. Which is where we were last weekend.
Eagle River is up in the Northwoods, near Minocqua. Ever since we moved here, the locals have been telling us we HAVE to go to the Northwoods and how great Minocqua is (the low-key resort town at the heart of it all). People absolutely insisted we would love it. I was always a bit skeptical. Having grown up camping in the Rocky Mountains, the idea of nature and woods without mountains or canyons is still a little odd to me. I kind of get lakes (the Northwoods has the highest density of lakes in the world), but we don't fish, so....? It seemed like the kind of place that would be great fun if you were renting a big cabin on a lake for a week in the summer with a bunch of extended family and Uncle Bob was bringing his boat so you could water ski and you happen to own a couple of wave runners. But even people who don't own ski boats said the Northwoods would be fun. So we thought it would be worth a look. And guess what.
It was very fun. We loved it. It is hard to be home.
But also nice to be home. And now I am ready to settle into fall routines.
I will be posting pictures soon. But not too many pictures. My camera is filled with lake water. Boo hoo. And how it came to be filled with lake water is a story for another post. (Or you could ask my kids, who marched off to school this morning ready to announce to their classes how they are never ever going in a canoe again.)
