Wednesday May 26th

We were on the road close to 10 am -- packed, fresh buns and hot cappuccino to go in the car, and the dog dropped off at the kennel. We found plenty to talk about on the drive north. We no longer had air conditioning in our car, but it never got unbearably hot. I drove all the way to Bay View Campground in the Upper Peninsula.

We decided it would be nicer to stop earlier and have more time to relax than to go all the way to Lake Superior Provincial Park in Canada. Besides, we had a ton of fruit that Ian didn't think we could take across the border (and some rum, too). So the plan was to eat as much fruit as possible, and for me to help out with the rum problem.

We found a very nice campsite only feet from the beach (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ianjones/pictures/North04/North04-Pages/Image1.html). The campground was relatively empty. We set up camp, and then took a walk up the beach, and explored a little of the inland area. It was very peaceful, and being on the beach was a rare treat that we enjoyed thoroughly.

We began cooking dinner on our two camp stoves. One stove screws directly into a fuel canister, and is very easy to operate but very LOUD. The other stove, a "Whisperlite", is more complicated to operate, and not always easy to light, but very quiet. Unfortunately, I had tremendous difficulty operating it on this evening.

We had purchased a new pump and re-fillable fuel canister back in Ann Arbor because our original pump and canister had gone missing. Once I gave up on the stove and dismantled it, I got sprayed with fuel, which suggested to me that the pump had been working just fine (and had been over-primed), and that the problem was probably within the stove itself. Fortunately this type of fuel evaporates very quickly!

After dinner I tried to start a fire with twigs and branches from around the campsite. I built it twig by twig, branch by branch, which had worked out in California last year. But I just could not sustain a fire - the wood was probably too damp from lots of spring rain. I was a little peeved that our neighbor seemed to have a pretty nice fire going. I guessed that maybe I didn't know so much about lighting fires after all. I had been pretty proud of last year's successes.

Our neighbor was a 50-something man camping solo. He had no tent - just a tarp lean-to. I found him intriguing and hoped I would have a chance to chat with him sometime. He looked like an interesting person.

We read by lantern light for awhile, but then climbed into the tent when it got too cold. In fact, it was so cold that, for the first time in all of my years camping, I had to climb inside my sleeping bag and draw the string almost to a close around my nose and mouth in order to stay warm. I realized that the North Face tent we'd set up probably didn't contain heat as well as the tent we usually use. It has a lot more screen-like surfaces, and the fly doesn't hug the tent the way the other tent's fly does.
^ Up North, May - June 2004 < Intro Thursday May 27th >