Nature's hearth

"To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain."    - - - Thoreau


I'm a little nervous about sullying my feelings of love for my life-long favorite place by working remotely from my northernmost parents' house for a few days. Today, in addition to figuring out my setup for working from the north woods while my laptop is in Atlanta hopefully getting fixed, Piper and I went to our most usual spot, but couldn't pause long for photos because we were getting attacked by hoards of mosquitoes. We made a lot of noise, so we only saw one deer (but lots of tracks), and thankfully didn't see the bear that's been hanging out in this region (or its cub).

The baking pine needle smell is my favorite.

"Why won't you let me eat deer poop again?"

Then, I went for a long bike ride on roads I haven't ridden on before, primarily on back roads that I also haven't driven on. My final destination was Luna Lake, which is the other place that Piper and I like to walk. The water was super high and the campground was very empty but for some hearty souls who had to have been hanging out in a screen tent. I tried to eat my bar by the picnic table. Even standing in the direct sun, I couldn't keep the swarms of mosquitoes off me. The biffy was a mosquito haven. Ugh. I'm glad I didn't try to take Piper there.

Luna Lake

It's a good thing I recently have ridden on sand and packed gravel roads recently. It helped me be more confident when I had two unexpected rather long stretches of gravel roads to cover on my road bike. One stretch was on Nine Mile Road, which, not oddly, runs along Nine Mile Lake. I've never been to that lake before. It was pretty astounding. The red wing blackbirds were very chatty. 

Nine Mile Lake boat landing

My route through the Nicolet National Forest was very winding and had a lot of rolling hills, tuckering me out a bit more than an average 50-miler. I'm glad I had the opportunity to push back the curtain and get out to where pretty much no one else was (except lots of deer: I saw 6 before hitting mile #7 - and stopped counting at 12).

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