Lake Living.16
This intrepid crew of friends & family, plus two who didn’t make it for this photo, yesterday walked all the way around the lake you see the top of this entry. That’s nearly 22 miles, and was a fun and full day to remember. Thanks, walking friends :-).
Lake Living Memories – Beauty in Smaller Details
Herewith part 2 of my photos taken during my time in Wisconsin last month that didn’t manage to get into the daily posts while I was still there. Enjoy 🙂 – and check out the last post, a few down, if you longer for wider vistas and length of focus than most of these shots have…
…and, well, just because every now and then they just stand out, there’s this sign of the times, my “errant mask” rogues’ gallery taken along the lake path at various points:
And we’ll end with nature going about its business in the late summer:
Lake Living Memories – Big Picture
Among the things I’ve learned from this year’s more-or-less-ongoing experiment in attempting to post something every day is that, when I’m excited by what I see around me, I take far too many photos to sort and put them up each day as they’re taken. Regular readers may remember in early September, when perhaps my very-most-regular reader noticed that although I was physically in Wisconsin, I had just posted something from California…which taught me that when you post every day, folks think what you’re posting reflects where you are.
So: I’m no longer in Wisconsin. My posts reflected my date of return in September quite precisely — lesson learned! — but … I’ve got a bunch of lovely photos that never made it onto the blog. So, fear not dear reader, I’m still at home in Santa Rosa where CalFire’s website says that the Glass Fire is (still) 97% contained, which is excellent news but not quite so excellent as a good solid inch or two of steady, slow rain falling all across the state over a 36 hour period would be. One place that has plenty of rain is, you guessed it, Wisconsin! So, here late in our dry season, I’m remembering greener wetter climes, where the autumn cool has already set in. This one has longer vistas. There’ll be a second post of photos that focus closer in soon. Enjoy! 🙂
Lake Living.5
It would hardly be a covid-era series without some indication of what the local rules are, eh? One of my current dreams (there are a few, a most-important of which involves unprecedented numbers of 20-somethings from around the nation turning out to vote in the next election) is that a day will come when young people of the future will hear their parents and grandparents talk about covid with much the same confusion and wonder with which my generation heard our parents talk about the fears of polio, in their youth. May it soon be so…
Lake Living.1
So a thing I’ve learned about choosing to post every day is that folks start to assume you’ll post from where you are. For example, when I posted a last “county view” item two days ago, my brother pointed out that it wasn’t from this county I’m in now. He knows this because that travel I documented yesterday – two of the three photos, in any case – brought me back to the Midwest to spend some time celebrating his birthday with him near the shores of Geneva Lake in a town called Williams Bay which is not far from the town called Lake Geneva. Yes, you read that right. Naming confusions notwithstanding (it does make a certain kind of sense, once you’ve sorted it out), it’s lovely to be able to hang out along and near the shores of these lovely lakes, even sometimes on these lovely lakes. (We did a morning paddle on neighboring Lake Como yesterday, but as I was on a paddleboard for the first time in my life, I left the phone aka camera in the car…) So anyway, now I’ll be trying to show you some of the lake views for a while. This being Wisconsin, there may well be other lakes in my immediate future. Enjoy. 🙂
Cruising Northern Shores
The road trip continued….although it takes me far longer than I’d wish to get these photos sorted and up here for you to enjoy! After leaving upstate New York, Mom and I decided that we simply couldn’t bear another trip along the usual I-80/I-90 corridor the follows the U.S. southern shore of Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan — our goal was Wisconsin, where we were able to spend a few lovely days visiting my aunt and uncle; and we were departing from Rochester which – by U.S. standards – is quite a piece north…and this led to my crazy idea to explore the northern shore of Lake Huron through Ontario. What a lovely outing it was!
This enabled us to spend a night in the lakeside town of Blind River, ON and to explore portions of that enormous province that I’d never been anywhere near, previously – gaining a more visceral sense of the beautiful, rich rivers and waterways which the Ojibwe and Cree have traveled since long before my ancestors arrived near these shores. I really wish we’d had more time to stay, explore and enjoy high summer along the Canadian shores of North America’s Great Lakes — but the wedding date loomed ever nearer and we had many other people and places on the list before we intended to arrive in Albuquerque. So here, and without much further comment, you can enjoy shots from Blind River, some not-so-great but they are what they are shots taken by Mom as we drove across the international bridge from Canada back into the US where three lakes are all coming very close to one another, along the channel directly connecting Lake Superior to Lake Huron and quite close to where the Edumund Fitzgerald went down in stormy waters back in the 1970s as commemorated in that wonderful song by Gordon Lightfoot…and then some shots from the Lake Michigan shoreline along Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and one beautiful farm-field sunset shot in Wisconsin. Didn’t get the camera out much more in Wisconsin and this shot doesn’t do justice to the huge midsummer sun sinking below corn fields in real time, but trust me – the upper great lakes region in high summer is pretty wonderful to spend time in.
In the photo gallery and below, the three shots taken by Mom from the Sault Sainte Marie Bridge, which connects the nations of Canada and the U.S. across the locks and waterway which link Lake Superior with Lake Huron, you are looking west over Whitefish Bay and it’s maybe conceivable (what do I know?!) the camera sees as far as the water above the spot where the Edmund Fitzgerald was found.
