Boundary Waters, Day 2

It rained steadily during the night. It is such a cozy feeling to hear the rain and have a roof over your head. Spending a rainy night in a tent is cozy too, but getting up, putting on wet shoes, and building a fire with wet wood loses its romance over time. I’ve had enough of that.

Jane had a problem with the drip coffee maker. The filters that came with the cabin had gone flat in the humidity. She’d avoided a filter collapse on Sunday, but was not so lucky today. Jane has a robust gag reflex, and coffee grounds in her coffee can be a trigger. I experimented with pouring the coffee through a folded filter. Not surprisingly, the coffee was cold by the time it was in the cup. I inspected the coffee maker and discovered that it would run just fine with the top up. I got some clothespins (we use them for chip clips) out of the vacation box and clipped the filter to the basket. Problem solved!

Flat coffee filters and how to prevent collapse with clothespins

We had eggs with onions, green pepper, cherry tomatoes, and cheese curds for breakfast along with fried corn and potatoes and a slice of bacon.

Breakfast: eggs with stuff, fried corn and potatoes, bacon

After kitchen clean-up and showers, we headed for Grand Marais to do a little shopping. While I hoped that our late, large breakfast would obviate the need for lunch, by the time we were done at the thrift store, visitor center, and B FRANK (Ben Franklin), we were both a bit peckish.

So we went to Sydney’s for frozen custard. We ate by the water.

Eating custard while squinting into the sun

The sky was perfectly blue over the lake and Artists’ Point,

Artists' Point

But cloudier over the mainland.

Clouds over Grand Marais

We drove up to Grand Portage National Monument. We watched an excellent film on the fur trade. We love to watch whatever audio-visual presentations are available, since both Jane and I have a history of putting them together. The quality has really improved over the decades, that’s for sure. There was a time when it was all done with slide projectors. Remember those?

On our way back through Grand Marias, we stopped at the grocery store for new coffee filters.

We had steak quesadillas with garden-fresh pico de gallo for supper, along with chips and grapefruit margaritas. It was a lovely evening to sit on the deck. We saw our first loon family—two adults and two brown adolescents way at the other side of the lake. I took a bunch of crappy pictures, of which this one had the best approximation of being in focus.

Baby loons on the far side of the lake. The adults are underwater.

We hoped the loons would come closer before the week was over.