Stuck in Lake City, MN

Weather has been against us the last three days. For three days the winds of have been between 15 and 30 mph right out of the Southeast, which is the worst possible direction for a canoe trying to traverse the lake. We made five miles yesterday and about seven the day before. Today we are holed up in rain and more winds from the southeast. Hopefully they will clear out this evening and we can push down the last twelve miles to Wabasha where the current is supposedly around 8-10 knots which would allow us to really make up some lost time.

Bald Eagles like Crazy

A bunch of bald eagles, seeing almost a dozen or more a day right now. Here's a few pics of their nest and as close as I can get. They are very camera shy...

Hashers in Hastings...

When we came ashore in hastings, Temple and I came across a hasher trail and started backtracking it until we ran into a small group of hashers... What's a hasher you ask? Well, here's a quick intro link: http://harrier.net/primer/history.html and a link to our home kennel: http://www.hash.org/.

Anywho, here's a pic of their trail, you can see the nice flour marks on the path...

A strange yellow thing in the morning...

Anyway, we made fourteen miles today and through lock number two and ended up in Hastings, MN after canoeing across Lake Rebecca... That was a pain in the ass, I can assure you. We are not looking forward to Lake Pepin.


We woke up and found this strange yellow thing floating just above the horizon to the east of us? Does anyone know what it is?

The Juggalo Barge

More pictures of our 36 hour hole-up on the "Juggalo Barge..."

Honorary JFL's for Life....

We ended day two still cold and a little miserable to wake up to rain, snow, rain, snow... snow so bad we could barely see the other side of the river and we were getting pretty desperate. We'd found an old abandoned barge with a shack on top that had been broken into. We spent 36 glorious hours in these fine accomodations where we were able to closely examine the "Juggalo's Manifesto" and decided to induct ourselves as honorary members of the group and thereby be a JFL (Juggalo for Life).

We seriously contemplated aborting, but my sister gave us hope with an updated weather forecast...

Day Two of the Trip

We made 20.5 miles on the second day of the trip. We were beating into a serious wind going from Snelling through downtown Saint Paul. Our feet were like ice blocks when we spotted the St. Paul Yacht Club landing and pulled up for a bag of ice (like we freaking needed it, it was only in the mid-30's). While there we decided we needed rubber, waterproof boots. We found out the hard way that Target does not sell Men's rain galoshes, you know the ratty looking green ones that you were too embarrased to wear as a kid? Well, beings how we had to take a taxi to the store, we decided to "go with what's there." I got these sexy metrosexual looking things from the ladies shoe department. Temple said he'd have gotten them too, but ladies size 10 is the largest they had, which fit my 9.5 just fine. He being a size 12 went with some more manly, but less waterproof boots...

Roadtrip continued...

and at our hotel in Nebraska, they have a weekly special that we thought was a bit curious...

More on the car trip...

And here's Knob's Road Utah is well.... what is up with the repressed people of Utah?

Moving on to Nebraska, besides the "if you're homosexual your going to hell" signs they also seem to have a lot of beaver to be concerned about as they seem to want to cross the road...

Backtracking to the car trip

Here are the promised pictures of the drive up. Of course, boys being boys, we find great humor in anything that can be twisted into sexual innuendo.

First up was the town of Beaver, Utah where we found this place:

Laptop Died and Trip Started

Well, of course my laptop took a dump about two days before we were supposed to start down the river. So, that's why there haven't been a lot of updates. I have a new laptop waiting for me once I get home for my next round of classes but it will be a little while until then, so the updates are going to happen in spurts.

Here's a picture of the canoe we found for $250. It is a 17' Alumacraft and she has fit the bill pretty good.

We only made it about 7 miles the first day, but we did get through lock number one. We ended up tieing up to a tree and walking down to the lock to find out what the procedure was. Turns out it's a freebie for any vessel. We went through the first lock in the rain all by ourselves. Dunno how many tens of thousands of gallons of water cycled just for us. We started laughing our ass off at the absurdity of it.

Trying to find a canoe...

Who knew how hard it would be to find a used canoe, late fall in Minnesota? We saw one that was pretty good, but he wanted $395 for it when a bunch of others were posted at $250-300. Unfortunately these other peeps were not responding and he wouldn't budge in price. Then yesterday I had a breakthrough and had two peeps finally call me back with $300 canoes. Going to go take a look at one tonight and hopefully strap it on the truck.

Leaving LA

Getting ready to head out. Temple finally arrived and we headed out to the Scarlet Harlot aka Scarlet Lady in Culver City for a goodbye cocktail (and so Temple can pay off his tab :-) We also played a couple of rounds of Golden Tee golf as we suspect that we will not have very many opportunities over the next few months.

Will upload a few pics in a moment...

Leaving Cali...

If my friend Temple ever arrives, we might actually make it out of town today... Good thing that we are going to leave in the rain right at rush hour. That ought to be pretty f'ing productive, lol.

Anywho, here is a picture of my custom pelican case for the trip. Pretty snazzy huh? I have the laptop hidden all the way underneath the foam insets for the small stuff. The empty space is for the camera...

Starting the adventure

My buddy Temple and I are just going over the logistics for driving up to Minnesota and snagging our canoe. Will post more later!