Thursday, October 14, 2010

10/9/10 Day 6

     We were falling into a bad habit of waking up later each morning, but it worked out alright this time as it took a little longer for Steven to make a breakfast of fried eggs and homemade sausage patties.  We dawdled around for a bit as Steven debated whether or not he needed to attend the annual Fire Commemoration Ceremony at the Moose Lake Depot Museum.  In the end, he decided it would be more fun to take us canoeing instead (also it sounded like it was gonna be really boring and he was glad to use our vist as an excuse to get out of it).
     This meant the next task was to load the canoes onto the truck and trailer.  We ran into a small snag when Steven couldn’t find his cinch straps, but no worries I had a solution!  We found some ropes and I showed Steven a knot that I had learned from my dad, the truckers hitch, which works jut as well, or maybe even better than cinch straps. 
     While we were doing this, Beth had been checking the depths of nearby lakes and streams.  She was hoping to find a place out of the public eye, since neither of the canoes had been registered that year. It's not that they were trying to avoid the fees, this was simply the first time they had gotten the canoes out this year.  We had even tried twice unsuccessfully at separate locations to register the boats with the DNR, but all the officer were “in the field.”  After online registration proved fruitless as well, we decided to paddle about Moose Lake and up the Moose Horn River.  We all felt that if a DNR officer decided to hassle us about our lack of registration, he could damn well sell them to us on the spot. 
     We had the boats on the lake in short order.  It was a perfect day for paddling.  The sun shone bright and there was a light breeze.  The going was easy, with only a slight current to paddle against as we made our way across the lake and up the winding river.  Well, the going was easy for Virginia and me, but the three kids in the canoe with Steven and Beth complicated things a bit.  Even under the constant threat of tipping over posed by the children, they kept pace with us, sometimes even overtaking us, until another episode of antsy-ness from the kids caused them to take their focus off paddling, allowing us to regain the lead. 

     After carrying on in this fashion for an hour and a half, breaking through and old beaver damn and gliding under a long, tunnel-like bridge, we came to another impasse.  Upon rounding a bend, we saw a second collapsing beaver dam.  We picked up speed, preparing to ram our way through, when we saw behind that a third beaver dam.  This one looked fairly recent, and rose at least two feet above the water.  We felt this was a good reason to stop, so we had a quick lunch of cheese, crackers, and trail mix before heading back home.  The return trip took us only a half hour, giving us just enough time to scarf down a dinner of pizza washed down by more Summit Ale from the keg. 
     Steven’s parents, Dick and Anne Blondo, had arrived while we were out and we chatted with them over dinner, but only briefly.  Steven, Virginia and I had to leave shortly after eating in order to make Duluth in tome to get good seats for “Evil Dead:  The Musical”
     The title pretty much says it all; singing, dancing and gallons of fake blood make up this goofy homage to the infamous film series.  As to be expected from “the ultimate experience in greulling theater,” there was a seating section called “the splatter zone.”  It was more expensive to sit there, but you got a free T-shirt and the chance to get covered in whatever gore flew off the stage. 
     We actually opted to sit in the regular, splatter-free section.  I think this was a good choice, because my favorite part of the show turned out to be watching the creative ways they soaked the people in the splatter zone.  This was a rather low budget production so this usually consisted of squirting audience members with ketchup bottles hidden behind holes in clothing or simply dumping buckets of blood on them.

     After a night of blood and laughter, we headed home.  Talk about the play lead to talk about our favorite horror movies, which lead to a general discussion of the supernatural.  Steven then gave us detailed accounts of two separate Bigfoot sightings in the area.  All this talk of the paranormal got all three of us a little bit spooked, enough that we made sure the doors were locked before we turned in for the night.
- Eric 

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