Summer Camping Trip 2007

This past weekend I merrily joined some friends for our annual summer camping trip. It started as an annual pilgrimage to the North Shore but has since become a migrating trip to a different place each year.

This year we hit Itasca State park to visit the Mississippi headwaters.

Unfortunately in all my headwaters pictures, no one failed to inform me the wind blew my bandana straight in the air thus making me look like a red klan member.

For the uninformed, the Mississippi River starts as an overspill of Lake Itasca.
The weekend was frought with adventure, well at least we tried to make it adventurous.

I brought my friend Mike- an avid fisherman.

He was truly a sport in hanging out with me and 4 people he'd never met before. My friends were thrilled that he brought his boat along. Our goal was to fish the waters of Itasca and Long Lake (where we camped) and have a fish fry Saturday night.

Unfortunately, the fish you see above was about the biggest we caught. There were many large fish jumping all around us. We just couldn't catch them. --Another thing I'll mention about MN northern lakes is that many of them are exceptionally clear watered. Long Lake was about the clearest lake I'd ever seen.

Sunday after breaking camp, the 6 of us decided to head to Bemidji to take in the sights and see Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. These statues were far cheesier than I remember of those formerly in Brainerd.

Seriously, Babe looks like he just smoked the world's biggest joint and Paul looks like he's wearing football gear under that grunge era flannel shirt.

Being the group of silly touristy people we are, we decided to play a round of mini golf a la Paul Bunyan themed. This is where our inner children shined.

This Picture looks wrong in many ways.

Every year we make Vern, the biggest guy in our group, crawl into the tiniest place we can find for a picture. Lately he's even taken to scoping out his own spots for us.

In the end, I made par for the course with 61!

After Bemidji, Mike and I decided to take the long way home and go through Brainerd. He's more familiar with fishing out of North Long Lake so we gave one last attempt at finding a decent sized fish for the weekend.

When we arrived at North Long, the water was about 6 inches deep at the public access. Fortunately, a couple of big dudes emerging from their kayaks like the Norse vikings helped push Mike's boat into the water.

From then on, we couldn't stop catching fish!

It was really hard to leave the lake but we knew we had to return home at some point.

Getting out of the lake was a bit of a challenge. It may look easy, but pushing a 16 foot boat through sand to try to reach the boat trailer is not a quick process. The viking kayakers had since departed so it was up to us, but we were succesful in the end.

Long story short- it ws one of the best camping trips ever!!!

Last night's bowling scores: 164, 189, 189. Missed my 189 triplicate :(