Putting in for some Vacation time.

Around here lately it’s been pretty busy, so we called in to Head Office and requested some time off.  We packed up the kid, the dog and some vacation-related items and headed to the thriving hub of East-Central Ontario: Plevna, the city that doesn’t sleep.  If you are looking for Plevna on the map it’s right there, between the Boonies and the Sticks.  Which suits me fine.

It was a sort of family gathering; Jenn’s aunt and uncle were there – and well they should be: it was their camp we stayed at – as were a few more of her aunts, another uncle, a cousin or two, nieces and nephews, mom and dad, inlaws, outlaws, you name it, they came by. 

We drove down on Saturday morning, going through Mattawa and Pembroke instead of the Haliburton and Bancroft way hoping to avoid the motor homes and such that were sure to be on the road because it was a long weekend.  Six hours later we arrived at Sand Lake and a mob of wound up kids like a swarm of bees found us and wouldn’t leave us alone.  They even managed to recruit Hunter into into their fold. 

Enjoying a ride on the Party Boat.

I did a bit of fishing, Jenn got to visit with her family and Hunter continued to run wild with the kids.

I don’t like the grip-n-grins of standard fishing catch photos.  Here is what our catch looked like at the end of the day.

Lake Scallops, or, Walleye cheeks.  Either name spells ‘delicious.’

A word about the fishing: I haven’t fished for almost two years and it was getting so I might have forgotten how.  I brought along a small rod and a few lures with me, expecting to catch sunfish and perch with my kid, but when I was invited to go out for walleye, I found my gear to be somewhat inadequate.  Happily, though, there were extra rods and worms and hooks and all so I was not to have an excuse for being skunked.  It ended up that I was not skunked, however, because I managed to trick a few fish into the boat, as did my guide and Jenn’s cousin, Gino.

I have enjoyed fishing for a long time.  As a kid, my dad’s dad used to take me to Port Credit to fish.  My dad is not an angler.  Nor, for that matter, is my mom.  I think my grandfather fixed dad on fishing when – as I am told – he was made the designated worm-putter-oner and fish-taker-offer.  As for my mom, I can only imagine what her mother must have said about fishing.  So, the task of putting on and taking off bait and fish fell to me, I suppose, in that Gramps used to take me instead, while mom and dad stayed home.  Honestly, I can only remember the one time and that’s vague at best, but it must have been a good time because I’ve always enjoyed fishing since. 

Skipping ahead a few years and we are now, as a family, at a resort on Lake Couchaching.  Things are pretty laid back: mom and dad are reading on the porch, my sister is somewhere close by and I am fishing about one hundred feet from the porch.  This is, of course, over water.  I am fishing off of a dock that is shaped like a ‘T’ with me on one end of the top of the ‘T’.  It’s a much longer way around to mom and dad by way of the dock.  I had a little rod and reel set up and I was dipping a worm in the water and watching all the perch or rock bass school around it, taking tentative bites.  Tap, tap, tap on the line.  Really, it was bound to happen sooner or later.  I caught a fish.  Now what?  I wasn’t sure what to do with the fish, but I was pretty sure mom and dad would know, so without even reeling in the line, I ran back to the cottage with the fish dragging behind me, along the dock at first, but then through the dirt and grass as I neared them.  Both of them were dreading this moment, even if they hadn’t thought about it before; it was there, in the back of their minds.   However, fate intervened.   A man and his young son, both heading to the dock to do some fishing of their own, saw me and saw the fish behind me and stopped to show me how to take the fish off the hook.  It wasn’t so hard afterall and, perhaps unbelievably, the fish swam away when I put it back in the water.

With all this talk about fishing, it’s maybe time for a word from our sponsor.

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All kidding aside, Gino was really good at the electric knife filleting, as this juicy cut shows.

While we were down South, we decided to take the kids on another treasure hunt.  Remember the Geocache episode of last year?  Before leaving for the weekend, I looked up a few easy-for-kids caches that we could do either while we were there or on our way home.  All the kids seemed to be interested and excited to try it, so we packed as many was we could into as few vehicles as we could and headed down the road.   The cache was supposed to be hidden by the only building in Vernnacher to survive a fire in 1903 and as we neared the site, it was pretty evident that it was going to be the church.  Everybody piled out of the cars and started to look around for something.  Some were looking under rocks, some were looking behind trees and then there was Hunter, who was looking for an ‘X’ on the ground.  It wasn’t long before Lauren found the hidden package and had all the kids diving in to see what sort of loot was left behind.  It was only luck that there were enough trinkets to go around.  The kids signed the log book and then replaced the trinkets with stuff of their own for the next people to find.  They all seemed to like the outing, but just to make sure, we went and had an ice cream cone.

You can see we didn’t have to walk very far to find the cache.  I’ll save the forced marches for Hunter and Jenn.

Lauren: finder of the cache.

Distributing the loot.

Putting in new loot.

Sunday was pack up and go home day.  We left early because we wanted to try to find the other Geocache that we had written down.  It was not too far away as the crow flies from the other cache we had found the day before, but because of the round-about way we had to take to get there, it added an extra hour onto our trip home.  We didn’t find the cache.  This may be due to two, possibly three, things:

1. My GPS was acting up.  It wouldn’t let me change part of the Northing and Easting information, so we could only get somewhat close. 
2. Someone had taken the hidden container.  I finally used a different method of inputting the coordinates and we navigated successfully to the site, but when we got there and began to look around, there was really only one spot it could have been and it wasn’t.
3. We suck.

We drove home the way we came down: hwy 41 through Eaganville to Pembroke and then Hwy 17 back through Mattawa and North Bay.  It was good to have a nice, relaxing weekend, but too many of those and there will not be anything done around here.  This weekend, it’s back to work.  So says Head Office.

Another happy-kid-on-the-party-boat picture.