We have a bad habit of leaving for vacation a week or more after we plan to. This makes making plans while we are on vacation absolutely impossible. So we don’t make plans. We just show up when we show up and hope for the best. How spontaneous of us. The problem is, it’s not always convenient for the relatives who we show up to see. And that means they aren’t always available for us to visit with when we’re here. In fact, like every body else on the planet they have jobs and places to be. So a lot of our time is spent wishing they weren’t working so we could all go to the lake together.

Finally we got tired of sitting around in our hotel twiddling our thumbs (we never actually did that but I’m just making a point) and decided to go to the lake by ourselves! Why not! We’re not complete bumbling city folks who can’t figure out how to get a boat to a lake.

Off we set without a plan or a reservation. It turns out we are bumbling city folks and things did not go as smoothly as they do for the locals. First off, we found ourselves blocked from the lake by a two hour wait for a construction crew to finish the road. A road that was supposed to be finished last year! If we’d gotten up a little earlier, we would have made it through because they open the road in two hour intervals. But at the time we arrived we were doomed to wait. And wait and wait and wait.

So we decided to drive all the way around the lake and go in the other side. It wouldn’t save us any time but at least we’d be doing something other than sitting around in our car. It turned out to be a good choice because we stopped along the way to take several pictures of the lake and the trees and all things woodsy.

Unfortunately driving around the lake didn’t quite get us “out of the woods” so to speak. When we finally arrived at the marina and inquired about renting a boat, we were told that we were too late and that all the skiffs were already rented out. There was a big barge bass fishing boat that we could rent for $100 for half a day. We were thinking about doing that but then things got really complicated.

For some reason, the woman at the boat dock (who didn’t seem very bright) couldn’t rent it to us until two in the afternoon. This meant we would have to sit at the dock and stare at the boat for an hour just because she was only allowed to rent the boat in three hour increments and we happened to arrive an hour before the afternoon shift started. It’s not like anybody was using the boat. It was just “policy”.

Policy schmolicy. We were thinking she could just rent it out to us and if we went over the time limit she could just charge our credit card. But no, that wouldn’t work because she didn’t know how to use the credit card machine! Then when we asked her if we could use the boat for four hours instead of three and that really sent her into a tizzy. Oh the math! We could see we were getting no where fast.

Finally, at her recommendation, we drove around to the campground on the other side of the lake and rented a canoe for half the price. There was a bit of confusion there too (because the campground and the marina happen to be run by the same not so bright people) but it’s nothing really worth blogging about.

In the end, we got a canoe and rowed over to the cove all by ourselves. It was magical! I’ve never really canoed before and I had no idea how fun it is to be so close to the water without all the noise that an engine creates. With every swish of the paddle, drips of lake water fell on my knees and legs. It was cool and delightful. I could have rowed all day. Toby said that rowing can be tricky when a jet skier or a motor boat goes by and kicks up wake, so we pretty much rowed straight over to the cove and parked it there. Which was also perfectly delightful. I can’t think of a better place to hang out. While we were there we imagined what it would be like to be home sitting in traffic. It’s so great to be on vacation!

The only thing that wasn’t absolutely perfect about our day was that we don’t own any fishing poles and the fish were jumping on both sides of us! Next time we’re bringing fishing gear. Toby’s parents even gave us a tackle box.

p.s. As I was preparing these photos for a slide show I kept going on and on about the size of my butt in the slide show at the top. In my mind, I am only a size four but in reality I’m pushing an eight an a half (especially now that I’m pregnant and I’m eating like a horse all the time). Toby got tired of my belly aching and told me he’d do some photoshop work on the photo to make me look skinnier. Photographer husbands are good for something, right? You can imagine my surprise when his photoshop work turned out to be this. At least it put things in perspective for me and I shut up about my “wide ass”.