Last canoe trip of the season

Aunt Maria sent an email saying a couple of trees had come down at the pond, and although the canoe (that I had chained down there for the summer) was spared, I probably want to take it home now. Julie, Nikki, Yon, and Tim were the only people at home awake (Sue was in a heavily medicated sleep due to her bad back medicine). Julie was the only child to volunteer to go with me to get it. We decided that being a beautiful sunny albeit cool day, we should at least bring the life jackets and paddles (and warm coats and gloves) and take one last cruise for the year. The water in the pond was unusually low so Julie started by walking the shoreline to the left -over to the Rainbow Girls Camp looking for once-sunken treasure. Then we paddled out into a light breeze and explored around the Camp Kiwanee boat dock area. We could hear the sounds of men’s voices and hammering and sawing up around the camps main lodge. As we drifted past below, we spotted my brother David and another guy working on side slope between the lodge and the waterfront. After chatting from our floating vessel for a few minutes, we headed back to our own piece of beach and hoisted the canoe onto the roof racks of the car. While I strapped the canoe down, Julie now went to the right, through the Cranberry Cove swim area to explore the now accessible shore along the Kiwanee side of the pond. Ater catching up with her, we followed the long uphill path to the Kiwanee Lodge to see what David was indeed up to. David and his friend Joe were mildly surprised to have unexpected company – particularly David when he then realized “Oh, that was YOU GUYS in the canoe we were just talking too!”. We got the run-down about the “viewing platform” they were going to build, then we joked about getting out before they roped us into helping. Of course, within moments they did – realizing that the two extra sets of hands would indeed be handy in lifting, balancing, and nailing into place the rough platform supports and bracing. After about 15 minutes of manual labor and wisecracks about how they should have hired a professional carpenter (which of course Dave actually is) we were on our way again. Seeing that Aunt Maria was now home (she wasn’t when we came in) I figured we should take a few seconds to let her know we were indeed taking the canoe home. Of course this “few seconds” turned into a half hour, joined by cousin Maureen. On our way out we checked out the “split-in-half-but-not-yet-fallen” tree in Maureen’s yard that was potentially threatening to drop on her roof at the next good gust of wind.
All in all a very pleasant, unexpected, and rare stretch of relaxing middle-of-a-beautiful-day quality time for me and my Julie.

Happy Autumn!