a short blip of photos from our mid-july trip to the experimental lakes. i pretty much spend every spare moment working on the bus, so it has taken me awhile to get to these. i celebrated my birthday on this trip, and woke up to the two kidlets singing me a very cool birthday song they had made up. they then hid behind trees and jumped out to surprise me as i made my way to my birthday tree (like a christmas tree, but you know, for my birthday), which they had decorated with their two stuffed animals. this might’ve been the best birthday ever.

the trip was overall wonderfull. we did the shorter loop of upper stewart /winnange /manomin /geejay /lower stewart and back up to upper stewart over the course of a week, so generally didn’t have too much paddling per day. i think maybe 6ish km on average. i loved the route, i had never been to manomin previously, and the portages both in and out of it were lovely. HUGE boulders at the end of the portage in, the kids were ecstatic, and i of course marvelled at what had dropped these boulders here. glaciers? glaciers really blow my mind. the portage out was a river that you could canoe part of, which jere and i did while the kids hung out at the other end. it was an oasis in there, a gorgeous steep valley. the next campsite we stayed at i think was my fave, it was on geejay lake, where the water wasn’t as clear, but the site was gorgeous. and throughout the whole trip we kept finding blueberries! burgeoning bushes of luscious blueberries.