Today we got up to a lovely breakfast at the B&B and then we were off to try to find the boat landing on Lake Manitou in the middle of nowhere. No that’s not right, it’s beyond nowhere. You go past nowhere, keep driving, to the middle of nowhere, and then you get to the lake. We found the landing and got there early so we had time to hang out before Melissa’s Uncle Bob arrived with Aunt Joyce to pick us and the piles of luggage up to take us to the cabin.
Back in March 2014, Uncle Bob and Joyce came aboard Apsaras for the cruise to El Salvador. When they were there we saw these cool native dugout canoes with hand carved paddles. We joked that they needed to take a paddle back to the cabin in Canada with them. Ha Ha. So after they left to go home, Melissa and Dave decided we had to find a way to get a paddle to them at their cabin. So we told our host Bill, that we wanted to pay $15 (the cost for a new paddle) for the oldest most scuffed up paddle they could find. Bill didn’t exactly come through for us as the paddle he bought from the natives was in much too good a shape. Regardless, Melissa headed to the airport to visit her Mom a few days after Uncle Bob left with the paddle in hand. When she got to the airport she was afraid that they were going to charge her $50 to take it on as baggage. But when Melissa explained it was for a practical joke, they got such a laugh out of it that they decided to put it on as “checked carry on”, meaning that luggage you could carry on but choose to check is free because it saves space in the overhead bins. When she reached Atlanta she had to go through customs with the paddle and expected at least a second glance from the customs agent, but he didn’t even blink. When she rechecked the paddle through to South Carolina, she had to tell the tale of the providence of the paddle yet again. Then when she reached South Carolina the agent that brought out the paddle wanted to know what the heck it was. Melissa then emailed her Aunt Char who lives in Minneapolis to get her in on the gag. She shipped the paddle to Minneapolis, and Aunt Char then took the paddle to the family cabin in Northern Minnesota where it sat all summer. The debate then was how to get it to Uncle Bob’s cabin in Canada. Fortunately Aunt Char headed to visit her brother in Canada just before we arrived here. She brought the paddle across the lake and hid it in one of the upper bunks in the sleeping cabin where she knew it wouldn’t be noticed by Bob or Joyce. She then emailed us yesterday to tell us where we could find it. So when we arrived, we retrieved the paddle and presented it to Bob and Joyce. Bob’s first words were, “how the heck did you hide it aboard the boat from the landing?!” We laughed and explained that we didn’t, Char did. Why Uncle Bob made Dave put on the goofy Captain’s uninform wasn’t entirely clear.
We inscribed the story of how the paddle came to be in the cabin on the paddle itself before it was mounted in its final resting place.
This is dottie the dog. She lives outside and comes out to whine endlessly till you pet her.
Joyce has an amazing vegetable garden out front of the cabin that fed us the whole time we were here.
