[at-l] Wousy Trip Report

[jbullar1 at twcny.rr.com (Jim Bullard)]

Tuesday morning I set off for Cranberry Lake to spend 3 days with 2 former 
coworkers from my days as a DOL bureaucrat. Bruce, the one who arranged the 
get together, had rented a campsite at the state campground and told me to 
meet he and John at site 120. The last time we went camping together was at 
one of my old stomping grounds from my childhood. We had camped right next 
to Bruce's van on a truck trail. Bruce isn't a mountain climber. He lies 
flat trails and he enjoys camp cooking. He insisted on providing the food 
and cooking for this outing too. Who would turn that down? Not I.

I got to the campground after driving through 5-6 bands of rain. The sky 
was heavily overcast as I pulled into the campground and I fully expected 
to find Bruce and John holed up in their tents. NOT! When I got to site 120 
there was a motorhome parked parallel to the lake shore. Now I not only had 
to razz Bruce about the weather he got for our outing but also for wousing 
out with a motorhome.

We chatted for a while before John offered to buy lunch at the Pinetree in 
Wanakena. We piled into my truck and went to lunch. After coming back we 
undertook a climb of Bear Mt. for the wonderful view of the inside of a 
cloud. On the way up Bruce wanted to find a geocache which turned out to be 
a total mess. It was in a Tupperware type container that was cracked and 
broken. The notebook that was meant for people to sign was a soggy useless 
mess. The whole thing looked more like litter than anything. I wasn't 
impressed with geocaching. I was impressed that Bruce's Geko GPS unit could 
get a signal under the dense tree cover.

Bruce did make us a great spaghetti supper while John and I paddled about 
in my canoe. After catching up on each other's lives we hit the sack around 
11, Bruce and john to the motorhome and I to my hammock under a brand new 
9'X9' tarp I had just gotten from Ebay. It rained off and on through the 
night. There was a thunder storm around midnight and another passed at a 
distance about 4AM. I was awake by 4:45 and got up at 5. They were still 
asleep so I set out in the canoe to see if I could get some photos from the 
water. It looked like it was clearing. That didn't last but I did manage to 
get a photo of Bear Mt. without a cloud around its top and an interesting 
cloud shot of a sunlit cloud through a hole in dark grey clouds. The lake 
was fairly choppy away from the shore and maintaining a straight course 
with the canoe was difficult.

After about 90 minutes of paddling I got back to the campsite to find Bruce 
and John preparing to leave after breakfast. It seems that Bruce planned 
the trip for Monday to Wednesday but mistakenly gave me the dates for 
Tues>Thurs. Consequently I had arrived a day late. Bottom line, we agreed 
that we should get together annually but get our dates straight next year. 
I got in a 4 mile hike and a couple of hours canoeing not to mention 
sitting on the lake shore to eat breakfast. It was fun if not the amount of 
exercise I usually put myself through when I go out on my own.