A Weekend At the Lake (with pictures!)

As I posted before, I spent this past weekend at my boss's trailer on Farm Island Lake, up near Aitkin, MN. It was just a small group of us from work and Mike's (that's my manager) dad. Doing a weekend away at a lake spot up north is a very popular thing to do in Minnesota, though somehow I had never done it before.

We really couldn't ask for better weather. It was sunny and clear, cool, and not humid at all. And just breezy enough to keep most of the mosquitos down. It was perfect.

Stopping to grab some brats and steaks on the way up, we got there late in the afternoon on Friday. We hit the lake in Mike's boat and just cruised around for a while. It isn't a very large lake, but we saw some really cool sights. There was abig eagle's nest on one side of the lake and loons everywhere (that's the Minnesota state bird), which you just don't see in the city. You could hear the loons' call through the night. Truly awesome.

We went back to the trailer and cooked up the brats on the grill, then made a fire and just spent the night talking about various thing. Happennings at work, which turned intoa discussion on the current state of the space program, to a debate on the political climate of the country, to a debate on the role of reliogion in today's society. Yeah...it got heavy, so we decide to retire inside and watch a movie for the rest of the night.

We got up...somewhat early the next morning to go fishing. I hadn't been fishing for years, and never to keep anything. I used to do catch-and-release fishing with my dad when I was a kid. Our plan was to catch a bunch of fish so we could make sandwiches for lunch. After about 3 hours of fishing, though, Ryan and I were the only ones that had caught anything. Good thing we brought turkey. We did still fry up what we had caught and had a nice little post-lunch snack. I had never even eaten lake fish before, so this was a first. Where have I been?

We spent most of the day just lounging around, playing XBox games that Ryan had brought and drinking beer. Later in the afternoon, we went back on the boat and tried out the inner tube being pulled behind the boat. Again, this was something I had never done before, and since I've never been very good in the water I was nervous. But Eugene went first and talked me into it. Man, was that intense. It takes so much strength to hold yourself onto that tube, but I was afraid of falling off, so I just held on. I did finally lose my grip and went flying off it, but it wasn't bad at all. And the water felt great! I was so exhausted though, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to pull myself back into the boat. I had some help though. We also got Ryan to go out on the tube (and he really flew!).




After all that, we went back to camp and got a fire going to get a start on dinner. Mike had a few chunks of old oak wood sitting around which we added to the fire, which added a really good flavor. Those were some good steaks! We also had fire-roasted corn and some garlic, cheesy potatoes Mike whipped up.

After dinner, we decided it would be best to go home. Some had to be back early the next morning and we thought it would be better to head back that night instead of getting up at the crack of dawn the next day. I guess I'm not the only who's not a morning person.

It was a fantastic weekend though. I had a lot of fun and I would really like to do something like that again. Maybe someday I'll have to get my own trailer by a lake.

Hmmm, time to start saving...