Minnesota Vacation Day 8

We are doing terrible things to our schedule while we're up here.  The boys were up pretty late again last night, and they really slept in today.  When we get home, we have just a few short weeks to get back to reality.  We had another morning of reading and hanging out.

I have been reading about the Minnesota State Parks System's Geocaching programs for a few years now, and we finally tried it out.  They loan out GPS units for free.  We had to go to Soudan Park to get it, but that's still a good deal.  On our way back to the cabin, we stopped at a dock store to look at floating swim platforms.  The store wasn't open, but the price tag on the one we were looking at was $869 - a major disappointment, because we don't want to spend that much!

We came back for lunch, then I took the boys to Bearhead for our first geocaching adventure.  The rangers had some trouble getting the unit programmed, so I didn't feel so silly for not being able to figure it out myself.  After getting it set up, we followed the thing to 3 different stations (one leading to another) and found the cache.  The boys seemed to like it okay.  We'll probably try the one at Soudan, too.  It was VERY hot, especially for up here, and that didn't help.  When we got home, Jeremy and I got our swimsuits on right away and got in the lake.  Zachary was not far behind us.  The swimming didn't last for long - a storm blew in and drove us out of the lake.

The kids watched a Johnny Carson dvd while Mom and I fixed beef lo mein for dinner.  They were laughing pretty hard at several points.  After dinner, the rain cleared up, so Jeremy and I tried another fishing trip in the canoe.  The lake was glassy smooth, but there was a strange sky - everything was very hazy, and you could tell some weather was coming.  Sure enough, we started to hear some rumbles of thunder.  Thankfully, Jeremy caught 2 sunfish that were ok sized but not big enough to eat before we had to go in.  The sky was unbelievably beautiful - such a strange mix of orange clouds, pure white puffy clouds, blue sky, and ominous looking sky in some directions.  Suddenly, it was raining again, then pouring.  Then it stopped again.  Right now, the lake is smooth and beautiful.

We're having a great time, but I would not be good at this single-parent thing long term.  I'm so happy to have Tim arriving tomorrow.  We've missed him!