Weekend Adventures

I still have two other adventure posts to do, when Nick's friend came to visit and a cabin weekend with my family.  Those are coming, I promise, but first a few other weekend adventures, showing you the fun things around here.

At some point on Friday we decided we'd go to Little Girls Point again this weekend, which I now realize I didn't blog about yet.  We went after another adventure (very out of town guests), which is why I haven't blogged about this beautiful place yet.  After our company left, we headed to Little Girls Point, a 45 minute drive east of Ashland in Northern MI (basically WI, right on the border).  We'd heard about this place for awhile but it never seemed to fit in our schedule, since a trip there and back would be 90 minutes in the car.

Lilly fell asleep on the way there, exhausted from a weekend with our visitors.

Once we got there, we were suitably impressed.  An absolutely beautiful view and a great combination of sandy and rocky beach. The rocks were nearly perfectly round, completely smooth.  Ideal skipping and cairn building stones.

Perfectly clear water

Lilly sorting which rocks she'd bring home

We had to really keep Lilly in check, she wanted to bring every rock she found home.  At one point she said, "I could just look at rocks all day!"  I told her, "If you become a geologist, you could get paid to look at rocks all day." She replied with complete shock and awe, "Really?!?!"

Her haul of rocks

This weekend we were all set to head back.  Nick also mentioned bringing the tandem kayak out of the garage and taking the girls out on the water (the first time since Lilly was born).  After checking the weather, we decided that Saturday would be the better day for paddling and vacuumed out the dusty, spider web covered kayak, hefted it on top of the minivan, and headed to the coal dock in Washburn to paddle with the girls.  Oh, we stuck a paddle board on top of the kayak as well!

While Nick vacuumed, the rest of us drew on the driveway.  Nick really wants a C-Dory boat and has Lilly convinced this is the boat for her as well.  So much so that she drew a picture of it on our driveway (along with a Moana boat because everything in our life right now revolves around Moana).

 

We got everything unloaded, got to the beach and the kids in the kayak with Nick.  I pulled out the camera to take a great photo of the girls snuggled up in the front cockpit, Nick in the back, floating on Lake Superior.  Turns out the camera battery was dead.  So we have no photos from this awesome adventure, a 2.5 mile paddle checking out the sea caves along the Washburn coast.  Lilly absolutely loved it, Greta wasn't so sure.  She thought Nick went too fast and the waves hitting my paddle board were too loud, and it was too wavy.  But when we asked her if she was having fun, she said yes. 

After I got back (and fell in the water off the paddle board for the first time ever), the girls played on the paddle board, even trying to paddle some on their own.  Such differences in the kids - Lilly wouldn't let us let go of the board, Greta kept telling me to let go! And luckily for me, a colleague of mine was at the beach when we got back and he helped Nick heft the beast of a kayak back on the van for me!  Nick snagged my phone and snapped a few photos of the girls playing on the paddle board.

 

That afternoon, Greta and Lilly went with Nick to the new Kwik Trip carwash.  We were unsure of how Greta would do since it would be noisy and there is no real backing out of a carwash.  Turns out car washes are great fun, even though you have to ride in them with your ears covered.  

That evening our friends Tim and Elizabeth came over for grilled pizza, corn on the cob and salad.  We made a delicious beet and feta pizza, margherita pizza, everything pizza (pepperoni, peppers, corn), and some pesto pizzas.   The girls had so much fun playing veterinarian, Greta even took my hand at one point, pulled me into the living room and said, "Come see Tim be goofy!"

Sunday we packed up and headed out to Little Girls Point.  When we got to Michigan there was a sign letting us know there was road construction - and that Little Girls Point was closed.    AGH! We had two boards on the van and two girls eager to go to the beach.  There was a waterfall nearby, Superior Falls, which we were maybe going to check out on our way home, so we went there first.  

We trekked down this giant, steep hill to the lake and then looped around to follow the trail to find the waterfall.  Lilly stopped dead in her tracks when she came across this building and noticed the warning signs.

  

It is a hydroelectric dam and Nick had to go ahead, find the waterfall and do some major sweet talking to convince Lilly it was safe to walk around it and check out the waterfall.  

Then we hiked back and decided to let the girls explore the shore there for just a few minutes before heading out to find a better beach for swimming and paddling.  

We trudged up the giant hill, Nick carrying Greta and all the rocks the girls deemed absolutely necessary to take with us and I carried Lilly on my back, which was about the nicest thing I have done for her as a mother, I was exhausted and breathing so hard at the top at the hill.

After the waterfall we went to another new place, Saxon Harbor.  It was just a little ways away from the falls and on our way back home.  Saxon Harbor was one of the places that had the most damage from that major storm last year and one of the roads at the Habor is still completely washed out.

Lilly didn't want to go to the beach at first but we were able to convince her to get out of the van and explore - and then she didn't want to leave when it was time to leave.   We didn't have time to do any paddling or swimming and it would have been tricky to get our boards out to the water, so we just waded and walked around on the rocks.

 

We had swimsuits and towels packed but we were already getting close to lunchtime and nap time, so we didn't pull them out.  At this point and enough of these adventures, we should know - always have them in their swimming suits.  Lilly did a great job of staying dry.  Greta, not so much.  She was even dunking her hair in the water!

We convinced Lilly and Greta it was time to leave and they reluctantly took a few rocks home with them and got in the car.  Of course we didn't bring back up clothes for Greta, so we put on her swimming suit for the drive home!   It was a delightful weekend that we ended with a pool in the backyard, shucking and then eating corn on the cob (along with the rest of our dinner), and bike riding.