This was a fun day! We left the cabin at 9:00 and drove to the Ash River Visitor Center (where we all might still have a little PTSD from Bug-Ageddon on Day 2). I met a nice older bicyclist dude out on the dock who told me about June berries then found some and brought me a handful to try. We loaded onto a boat with the oddest group of 25 other people…EVER.
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| Our ferry at Ash River Visitor Center |
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| Family picture on the dock |
There was this bat shit crazy mom from Chicago who was just a hot mess. She had three sons, her husband, a girlfriend of one of the sons and either her mom or her mom-in-law and she might have been the loudest person I’ve ever encountered.
But no one topped JENNIFER – our ranger or deckhand
depending on which hat she was wearing.
She had either a really high or really low IQ and was just
adorable. I envied how much she clearly
loved her job and Ryan said she must wake up the same way Sponge Bob does but
to her bald eagle alarm clock. She spent
a lot of time explaining that when she points things out she will reference a
clock so the boat moving forward is 12:00.
And directly to her left is 9:00am (which made us chuckle because what
about 9:00pm?)
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| Meet Jennifer (in the life jacket) |
We stopped on our way to Kettle Falls and saw multiple bald eagles including a baby in his nest.
When we got to Kettle Falls and the Kettle Falls Hotel, we
ate our lunch in a screened in porch that was part of the hotel and met a
couple of very cool younger people traveling solo, both from Texas. One was a
guy Frank who is an Influencer (IG handle SpeakingQuiteFrankly) and lives in a
tiny house and one who was a music teacher at Texas A&M. Almost everyone on the boat had been to
multiple national parks. The sons of the bat shit crazy mom asked the kids to
play volleyball with them – the oldest one who just graduated high school
clearly had a mad crush on Ry and told her his parents think he’s going to
Florida State University in the fall but “just between you and me, I’m actually
going to Europe.” WEIRD.
We took a quick tour of the dam and the falls (with Jennifer) and it started raining but not too badly. We got back on the boat around 2 and talked to Frank most of the way back. He’s wrapping up the Lower 48 on this trip once he goes to Wind Cave and Teddy Rosevelt. We also met an older couple from Tennessee. The wife was a retired high school teacher and she might have been my older soul sister. They’d been to 34 parks and she said they’d turned their dining room into a map room.
After we got off the boat, she walked up next to me and said
kind of clandestinely, “So, should this even be a national park?” Funny!
We said goodbye to Frank and stopped at two places on the
way home, trying to find mosquito nets for our faces. Both places were sold out – the first guy
said he’d sold 50 in the last couple of days and the other place had sold
40. They said the bugs are usually bad
but that they are especially, incredibly bad right now, which is also what the
cashier at Town Drug in International Falls said. So, no luck on face nets for tomorrow.
We got back to the cabin and the temp had dropped a
lot! I did a yoga routine, Grant and I
played Gin Rummy and I kicked his ass…again, we fixed tacos for dinner and the
kids took the kayaks out again tonight.
It’s 10pm now and I can hear fireworks all around me. I
think it’ll be an early night tonight because we’re meeting Dan, our boat captain,
tomorrow morning at 8:30 on our dock!
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