Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

And so, on the first day of traveling in an RV with four children, significant things began to go wrong. It was inevitable, of course. We’ve been talking for more than a year about how we would handle problems, how it would alllow us (adults) to grow through adversity, and how it would teach our kids valuable life lessons, including the fact that their parents are fallable.  First, the retractable bed above the cab (driver’s and passenger’s seat) became stuck in the down possion. This meant that departure day began with a trip to a local (Duluth) RV shop, only to find that a repair was not possible on the spot. Fortunately, this situation doesn’t prevent us from driving (or driving safely) but it does interfere with keeping our scalps intact each time we stand up from those front seats. On the plus side, more storage. Here were are pre-departure. All smiles! Second, after we reached our destination (Munising, MIchigan) in the middle of a downpour, we found that the autom...

I wrote a couple of short posts about certain days during our two-week stay in Iron River, WI but I feel impelled to reflect on that time. It was exquisitely vacation-like and it will make me happy in the future to remember the things that created this. Let's do this Letterman style: #10: Hayward, WI Sometimes you need something to do. The kids are getting rammy. The house is feeling small. The weather isn't what you hoped. So we hopped in the car and drove about an hour to Hayward to see the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and a small-town amusement center. We skipped the latter and instead spent quite a bit of time on main street shopping, eating ice cream, eating dinner and also enjoying a small little city park along the river. Elise, Ali, Cate and Henry in the mouth of the worlds largest Muskie. This gave us the chance to see the banner advertising the lumberjack world championships later that week. This was an unexpected highlight of the trip so far. Hayward...

Whoa. Just whoa. There's just no way that I could have guessed that, in the course of this adventure, we'd be on ESPN3. You heard that right. Not ESPN. Not ESPN 2. Not ESPNU. Not ESPN-Chess. ESPN3. Because on Monday we went to Hayward, about an hour south of us, and noticed banners for the World Lumberjack Championship, to be held August 1-3. And we decided to go back, risking another round of tantrums about spending money at the toy store. Have you ever been to a World Lumberjack Championship? Have you been to a lumberjack competition at all? It was like being at an American Ninja Warrier shoot but without the production. These are serious athletes. Even as I write this, I don't know what pictures I'm going to post. It was that incredible. It was also like a miniature county fair. We ate brats, burgers, chips, kettle corn, caramel corn; the twins had their faces painted; somehow, nobody got wet in and around the under-12 log rolling tank. Oh, and parking ...

On the same day in 2002 that Elise read Dan Brown's Davinci Code (in one day, of course), I learned about the Brule River. It's the kind of river you can miss easily as you drive east from Duluth on US-2 toward Washburn, Ashland and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Just a little green roadside sign near a crossroads town. I remember that Elise mentioned something about a former president loving the Brule and it being a favorite for paddling and fishing. (This is a nontrivial aside. Calvin Coolidge had a summer White House on the Brule and, as we learned , converted a local high school into a base of political operations.). But as soon as we booked this cabin, just east in the town of Iron River, it became apparent that a canoeing adventure on the Brule was in my future. With help from the good folks at Brule River Canoe Rental , we were delivered to the Stone Bridge Canoe Ramp at about 1:45pm. One adult, one twin and one big in each canoe. We had a nice breeze at our bac...

The last 24 hours have just been summer on an epic scale. Yesterday, after a long morning of water play, we drove into Duluth for a backyard BBQ with a group of Elise's friends from high school. I didn't count but there were a handful of couples, so a dozen adults or so, and innumerable kids between 1 and 11. We spent the night in Duluth (a disappointingly sleepless night for too many of us) and drove back this morning. The children of the high school friends. Lily, the oldest among them, is in yellow. Swimming, lunch, more swimming, even more swimming, then some swimming off the pontoon boat then a break to watch some shows, eat some dinner and then a bit more bedtime swimming. Hopefully they'll sleep all night. My favorite moment came after dinner during a short canoe outing with Lily and Cate. Our lake appears to be home to one pair of loons. On a still, glassy lake, we slowly paddled toward them. I'm sorry to have caused them distress but they swam in oppos...