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 This weekend, my father and I went to our sailboat in the Apostle Islands, which is an archipelago in Lake Superior, at the northern tip of Wisconsin. When I was growing up, our family spent summer weekends here in the Apostles. The twenty-two islands and a few miles of shoreline are a protected national park. Some families stay at home, others go on excruciating road trips… we came here.
For the first dozen years it was on a twenty-six foot, red sailboat, aptly named Cabernet. That boat saw its end, not by sinking in fierce waves in the middle of the lake, which it had survived a few times in its life, but by being blown of its winter-storage cradle by a freak windstorm in the spring, a few days before we arrived to launch her into the water.
My parents quickly replaced Cabernet with a longer, slightly more luxurious and speedy sailboat, which my mother named Island Pearl. It was never quite the same, sailing. Our older boat, the red one, was so small that it made us become quite close – in sleeping, in living, and in eating. We had a small table for meals that, if one wanted to get out from behind it, everyone would have to move.
We drove up this weekend on Friday. Saturday morning, I did an interval workout on one of the back roads of Bayfield, which is the town where we dock and store our boat.
Star Route Road, the road on which I did the intervals, was the very same road that I did my first great rollerski tour. I was probably fourteen years old. For the day, I had a two hour classic rollerski planned. Somehow, I got it into my mind that if I did twice as much, then I would be twice as good.
So, I went for two hours out, until I was attacked by three gnashing dogs outside a rundown house. There was an obese kid in the window, just watching me being attack by his dogs. After ten minutes of poking them with my poles and trying to out-maneuver them, I was able to turn around and ski back for a total of four hours.
My Saturday morning workout was much less eventful. It went really well. When I returned to the boat, we sailed out to an island, where I was able to hike for my afternoon workout. Because there was a chance of thunderstorms, and we were anchored in a bay, rather than docked, my father decided that we should return to Bayfield for the night.
I leave on Tuesday for a three-week training camp in Heber City, Utah, so we had to leave this afternoon to give me enough time to pack and settle things.
Peace,
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