Friday night we headed out to Selkirk Shores State Park and rented a cabin (#10) for the weekend.

Admittedly, the start of the weekend was a little rough. We had (or more accurately, still have) a little situation at work that called for me to pretty much be tied to my cell checking and/or responding to e-mail messages until 1:00am Saturday morning. I’m all for being wireless, but remember when camping used to be about getting away from it all?

I finally decided that I was going to turn the cell off and enjoy Saturday morning. Chinook was a little restless the night before. She was walking back and forth on the floors and her nails were clicking against the floorboards. Bank and forth. Back and forth. I moved her bed to a couple of different positions but she just wouldn’t settle down. Finally, I brought her up on the bed with me.

Chinook and I have a mutual arrangement as far as the bed goes. I don’t allow her on the bed uninvited or allow her to sleep on the bed at night. She doesn’t like to sleep on the bed …. or at least while I’m around … and avoids reprimand by sleeping on her bed. It works.

Friday night, however, she sleep at the foot of the bed for the majority of the night. At least, until around 5am. At that point she jumped off the bed and began pacing the floors once again. Click, click, click, click … pause. Click, click, click, click. You get the picture.

We decided to start our day around 5:48am.

Alert canine in hand, we hit up the blue, yellow, red (portions of this trail twice) and a segment of the orange trail. In all we walked about 4 miles round trip. The trails were well groomed with ample trail markers. The entire trip we saw one person — twice.

Blue Trail

A runner passed us on the blue trail and about 20 minutes later lapped us again. He indicated that ran this trail twice and then went on to mention other trails he was running as his voice faded into the distance. He was running a pretty good pace too. As my grandmother and Aunt Emily used to say, “Awe. God bless ‘em.”

Red Trail

Along the way, we manged to hit a couple geocaches. It’s been a while since doing any geocaching so this was a nice change of pace. My wife and I had pretty good team work. She navigated us to through the trails while I walked Chinook and She watched Chinook while I did the off trail exploring. The geocache “Papa’s Park” was especially gratifying as we were unsuccessful finding it last time out.

“Papa’s Park” – N43 33.021 W 076 12.320

“Arlie’s Selkirk Search” – N43 33.197 W 076 12.014

The second cache was the reason that we doubled back on the red trail. I’m glad I did because it allowed me to swing on this vine we came across on the trail. At first I was skeptical if it would hold this beautifully sculpted body weight, but I think it could have taken quite a bit more pounds as well.

There was a third cache in the park, but we decided to return to the cabin for lunch. At this point the hiking was a little longer than I expected it would be and I wasn’t sure how well the dog would hold up.

After lunch, a brief hello to the Piper family and Marylee who arrived in the early afternoon, I headed down to Grindstone Creek with pole in hand. I spent about three hours fishing from the mouth about a 1/2 mile in and back again. I saw several groups of gar pike, a couple of big carp and one big brown that looked like a confused veteran of the fish hook wars. And I had nothing … not a hit. I fished it with bobber and on bottom. With live worms, plastics worms, jigs — even through a few egg sacks out there. Nothing (although I saw several fisherman all with similar looks of aggravation and no fish).

About ready to pack it in, I had a big hit on my bobber. I set the hook and it started to run a little (4lb test). A few seconds later, all hopes were dashed as I hooked my natural nemesis, the water snake. I hate those sneaky bastards. I tried to shake him off my hook, but ended up loosing my rig. Which was pretty much fine with me. I packed it in and headed ba
ck to cabin.

Did you know that the local pizza place delivers to the state park? Yup — pizza, wings and Coronas for dinner.

We had a good time visiting with Brian, Heather, Uma and the kids. Our dog melted into a puddle on the lawn. To the point where my wife was concerned she wouldn’t wake up again. And later that night, there was not a single click, click, click on the floor boards to be heard.

Paul, Sue and some of their family arrived at the cabin next to Heather and Brian and the next morning we said hello over coffee before heading home.

Below is my favorite picture of the weekend.

Elizabeth's Web - 2009