I made it back alive from the excursion up North. The trip up there wasn’t what you would call smooth, but we made it. By the time we left Cambridge we were already an hour late on account of the convoy being late coming from Paris, then compounding the issue by the fact I forgot my sleeping bag at home. On the long drive we made 3 stops including breakfast at 5:30 in the morning. By the time we got to Larder Lake it was 10:30. There was some confusion as to where we would be parking for the walk across the lake, where we ended up at some random persons cottage where the woman there tried to help us out. We then went to a second launch spot and managed to get Phil’s truck stuck in 2 feet of snow after leaving the single lane of packed snow road we were on. After about half an hour we got the truck out. After that ordeal the woman who’s cottage we were at previously had followed us into town to see how we made out, at which point she told us that it had dawned on her after we left that she should have just said we could have parked on her property and gone across the lake from there. So we went back to where we had been an hour ago to cross the lake. We unloaded all our gear onto sleds and toboggans and headed across the lake. By this time I was just beat. I don’t operate well on short sleep, so the walk across the lake felt like it took forever, and since I had no idea where the cottage was I had no idea when the walk would end. At exactly 1pm we were standing outside the cabin, the trip having taken 13 hours to get there at that point. For me the rest of Saturday was pretty much a wash. I think most of the guys went to bed around 9 as we were all pretty tired after that long day.

Sunday we got up and actually did some ice fishing. It was a pretty nice day without too much wind, so it made for a nice day to be out. We drilled 5 holes and didn’t get anything close to a bite. It probably didn’t help that after awhile we started playing a game that was kinda like tackle 500 up, where we had a Gatorade bottle with some water in it tied to a rope then thrown hammer toss style across to the other team. It was quite fun, but I’m sure it would have scared away any perspective dinner candidates. We fished for 3 hours before heading in for lunch, only to have a storm roll in and negate any more fishing for the day.

The whole weekend was pretty good. We just chilled for much of it. I got a bunch of reading done and we played lots of cards and crokinole. One thing I learned from the whole experience is how much I suck at crokinole. Sleeping at night wasn’t that bad. I know before going I was concerned with how cold it would be, but we had a wood stove that we kept going the whole weekend that kept the cabin plenty warm. We even used it to make baked potatoes the one night, which was pretty badass. I can definitely say I learned a lot from the whole experience. I packed way too much. I was really concerned about the cold, so I packed extras of nearly everything only to find that anything that got wet could be dried out and that since it was mostly cold you didn’t sweat a lot, so you could wear the same clothes for a couple of days without too much issue. Oh well, lesson learned.

We packed up on Monday morning and got spared the walk across the lake in a snowstorm by one of Dickie’s neighbours who was kind enough to ferry us across the lake by snowmobile. I got a ride in the sled being carried behind. I know according to Natalie Portman’s character Sam from Garden State that sidecars are for bitches, but I wasn’t too worried. It seemed more gay to be riding directly behind another dude on the snowmobile, so I was happy with my choice. By the time I got dropped off it was 8:30pm and we had been driving for most of the day.

As you can see from the pictures I posted, there were mustaches. Phil and Nick kinda cheesed on it and kept growing a beard, but whatever. Kitchen had the handle bar mustache going, while Kevin was sporting a molestache. Up North no one seemed to even look twice with all the bad facial hair we had. There were lots of people wearing mustaches, which I would have kinda expected.