Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Sorry for the wait, folks, but things have been a little too hectic here to get a post (or several posts) online. This morning I pointed out to Elise that two weeks from today (Saturday, August 10), we will be in Duluth with our RV. Between now and then, she and I will fly back to Oregon, spend about a week packing and preparing, and then three days driving to Minnesota. That also means we're two weeks away from something resembling a first day of school. Holy cow, the preparation for that has really consumed us for the last few days. Probably procrastinated on that task a bit too much. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to tell you the story of last weekend, which we spent in Minneapolis. To set the scene, we left our cabin in northern Wisconsin on the morning of Saturday, August 3rd; we dropped excess stuff back in Duluth and then drove about three hours down to "the cities." Unbeknownst to the kids, our former nanny was on a flight from Colorado for a surprise visit...

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...

Dear Reader, Having successfully broken the streak of consecutive daily posts, my attention turned to the looming milestone: one month on the road. I'm writing on Sunday, July 21. We left Portland on Sunday, June 23. In case you've forgotten, that was spent approximately one week on Whidney Island, one week driving to Minnesota and the last two weeks with Elise's parents in Duluth. This past week was camp for all four kids. Lily and Henry went to an overnight camp on Sturgeon Lake, about an hour's drive south the city. Ali and Cate went to day camp, also offered by the Duluth YMCA. Among other things, this meant that Elise and I got to disappear for 24 hours up the North Shore of Lake Superior. For a moment, I need to tell a story from almost two years ago in order to explain why we're doing what we're doing this summer. First of all, we have been talking about doing this trip for several years. In the fall of 2017 we (the two of us) went to Italy for two ...