The Rum River and a Canoe

It's September 18, and it's fall in Minnesota. Mother nature isn't sure what exactly that means for the weather - this past week has, an alternate days, been windy, rainy, still, sunny, and has been in the high thirties or the mid fifties - but she is sure that it means no more warm, sunny weekends. Last weekend was the last, and we took advantage of it!

We packed up the canoe, camp chairs and a cooler full of food and set off for the Rum River State Water Trail. The weather was beautiful, and eagles were swooping out in front of us all day.

About halfway through we stopped on a sandbar, built a fire and grilled some brats for lunch. While we waited for our brats to cook, we enjoyed some brews, waded in the river and Calhoun did some fishing.  It was one of the most relaxing lunches I've had all summer!


The river was tricky though! It was so tricky that I didn't have time while we were moving to take a picture! If you look at a map of the river you can see that the river zigs and zags back and forth. In addition to the path of the river, there was a lot of dead fall (fallen trees) in the river. Thank goodness Calhoun has excellent canoe navigational and steering skills because we made it through the maze without suffering any harm. Even though it was tricky, the action kept us alert and we had a great day.

I may have mentioned before, but Calhoun and I have two canoes in our garage - we own neither of them. One belongs to Nokomis and Eveleth, it was a wedding gift and was made by one of Eveleth's uncles. It's in our garage because they don't have storage space, but the reward for storing it is that we use it whenever we want! It's a beautiful, long, fast, fiberglass canoe and we love to take it to the boundary waters because it just cuts through the water. The other one (pictured here) belongs to my parents, it's an Old Town (not sure the model) and has a wide, flat plastic hull. We call it a bathtub. While the boat isn't fast, it's stable and when we were scooting over fallen trees I was glad we had a boat that could get over the branches!