Falling short

This posting comes to you from Beloit WI. It's not a bad place, just not quite where we'd anticipated being for the night. Perhaps planning to make it from Grand Forks ND to Lebanon IN (NW of Indianapolis) was a bit more than I should have planned?!? On the one hand we would have made it with ease (having left Grand Forks at 6:15), but we ran into heavy traffic and even heavier rain as we crossed Minnesota and Wisconsin. Those two slight drawbacks, however, could not detract more than a tiny little bit from the glorious scenery, rivers and creeks, long views across fields of grain and corn, undulating land populated by cows, farm complexes complete with real barns (that is, red) tucked into protected hillsides, and ponds and lakes everywhere. Even if we'd not SEEN the ponds and lakes, the fact that at least two of every three vehicles we saw today towed a boat would have been dead give-away. It was truly one of the loveliest of days.

With our having fallen short of our planned destination for the day, we'll likely not arrive home Sunday night, but sometime mid-day on Monday. Making the Grand Forks/Indianapolis trek in one day would have been a memorable feat, indeed, something about which we could have boasted, perhaps. But, the better thing is to arrive home, period. No real need to prove anything ... Yup, all that's likely a justification at some level. But, the end of vacation is hard enough without making it an endurance contest. There's enough of that in life already without purposefully building it in.

The photographs accompanying this posting are from Thursday, our last full day of fishing, and yesterday, the sad morning we left Shining Falls. The air service was about an hour late, making the departure that much more difficult. A clean and quick break would have hurt less -- something my mother taught me in childhood with the band-aid! And -- ugh, we flew in the Cessna, a very bumpy 40 minutes. I'm not proud to say that I was slightly green-tinged by the time we landed in Bissett. But, I kept a stiff upper lip and didn't embarrass myself.

This is one of my favorite shots of Tal from our time at Shining Falls. We were fishing in a special spot for us, an area we call south bay. While we enjoyed exploring many parts of Family Lake, when Chickie needed fish for supper time, this is the place we headed at full throttle.


And, here 's Tal with the fruits of our morning in south bay. He looks happier with this stringer than he did in the earlier photo posted on June 20th, doesn't he?

Finally -- and at last, allow me to introduce you to Chickie and Pat Harristhal, owners of Shining Falls Lodge, here standing on the dock under the wing of the Cessna as our gear was being loaded. Tal has known them since the summer of 1988 when he and his son, Bruce, went on a canoe trip into the Boundary Waters -- a trip organized by them when they owned Canadian Border Outfitters, located northeast of Ely MN on Moose Lake. They are dear to us and getting to spend time with them is a significant part of the draw Shining Falls has for us.