Lake of the Woods

Wow! What a trip! We spent Friday, Satruday and Sunday on a camping trip up to Lake of the Woods, which for those of you who don't know, is right on the Canadian border of Mn and Canada, about 8 hours north if you include stopping for lunch and potty breaks. Oh my goodness! We left the twin cities around 10am on friday and headed north after meeting up with Aaron, James's brother and his wife and four kids. Aaron and his family were hauling their boat behind them because Lake of the Woods is supposed to have some great fishing. Actually, my whole idea when I planned our family camping trip with the Knoblauchs was, "hey we are going to have seven kids, so why don't we go to this great big lake with a 3 mile long beach and have a fun road trip whihle we are at it!" Well, fun road trip we did! As we drove north, the clouds became darker and darker and darker until, about 2 hours south of Lake of the Woods it began to downpour, and I mean, really downpour! We thought, we will drive through and by the time we get there, it will be clear skies! Well, we got through the storm and then about an hour later, it started again. When we got up to the campground, it was clear skies. We set up our tents, unpacked everything and began grilling our chickend and roasting our corn. James even engineered a really nifty rain shelter out of a tarp, some clothesline and three huge sticks that he found. We had a really nice time friday night by the fire. We tucked ourselves into our little campsite for the night and fell asleep. Well, about 4am the rain started. It kept raining and raining and then about 7:30 am James said we better go into town for breakfast because it was soaking at the campsite. So we all bundled into the cars and headed for town. We had a great breakfast at the Ranch House restaurant in Baudette, MN and then James and the guys bought some fishing bait and we decided to wait out the rain. Well, that didn't end up workin gout, because it just kept on raining! Until around noon, we decided to pack up. The forecast said more and more rain until Sunday, so we headed back to the campsite to pack up. After we packed up in the rain with ponchos on (which was actually pretty fun, James and I were a good team!), the real fun started! We decided to drive down the windy trail to the actual LAKE of the Woods, since we hadn't seen it yet, in the rain. About halfway down the road we saw that a tree had fallen in the storm and we could not pass. I threw James his axe and he chopped the tree so we could move it off of the road and then we got down to the beach. There were about 30-40mph winds on the beach and James and I ran down there and snapped some pictures. Then we hopped in the car and headed the 4hrs back to Brainerd to stay at his mom's house with Aaron and the kids and Debbie(James Mom) and Keith, her husband. They had also come up to camp but there tent was missing two pegs and they had to stay in a hotel friday night! We finally got to Brainerd Saturday night and Aaron's car tracker said that we had driven 15 hours at that point in the last 1 1/2 days! We had dinner and put the kids down and everyone crashed. Then on Sunday we drove the boat to a beautiful lake in Crosby, MN and spent the day on the lake, the kids playing and going on tubing rides behind the boat. We finally got our beautiful sunny day! And acutally, we all got a lot of sun and layed around talking and had a picnic by the lake. It was a great day! Then we packed up and drove back home on Sunday night. Gosh, I feel like I just took a two week obstacle course run or something! It was a crazy weekend