Day 4: Easy Half Camp to MN Hwy 6 Bridge Landing

I woke up around 0200 and could not go back to sleep. That happens to me when I had 4-5 hrs of sleep. I could not tell whether it was raining or whether it was just drops falling off the trees overhead. The worst: no pencil. The ballpoint pen I had must have dried out a long time ago. Nothing to do but let my mind wander. At 0400 I got up and made a nice cup of espresso. While I was making my coffee, I heard a barred owl (Strix varia) call its phrase, appropriately "who cooks for you, who cooks for you all." "I for myself," I wanted to call back.

Since everything was dripping, I got back in the tent, from where I had to evict a swarm of mosquitoes that got in. I thought some more and I dozed and finally got up at 0600. I took some pictures and lured the jungens out of bed with a promise of spamini sandwiches. They were a hit: a slice of fried Spam with pepper jack cheese between two slices of pan-toasted bread, the whole compressed with a spatula. Yum!

James contemplates the morning and how to get out of chores.

Better a few raindrops on your tent than one tree.

Get me out of this place.

Thus fortified we packed up and got in the canoes, back to our original pairings for the remaining 10 km. James cast his lure, without any success. The sky was cloudless and as the sun gained height it became hot again. The river was quiet, with a mirror-like surface. We saw a deer and a few kingfishers, but that was it.

Lazy paddle on a lazy river.

State Highway 6 bridge and landing

The bridge materialized as expected, behind a bend and the landing was mucky, also as expected. But there was a nice parking lot with a grassy staging area. After I helped James to bring everything up, I went to the road to hitch a ride. There wasn't a lot of traffic, especially northbound. For every eight cars going south there was one going north. I soon tired of waiting at the bridge and of being turned down by passing drivers. I thought 20 km, that's three hours and took off at a good pace. I wish I had had my running shoes, I would have made a jog of it. After about 3 km and a few more cars, one stopped and covered the remaining distance in a quarter of an hour.

We made short shrift oft loading up and when I took my ceremonial and cleansing parting bath in the river, the boys joined me. Refreshed, we started the drive home and only stopped in Grand Rapids for a submarine sandwich. Like the drive up, the return trip was uneventful and we made it home in about 5 hrs.

Odd to be sitting on a soft bucket seat.