Burt Lake Reunion

Again we have pulled off the family gathering on Burt Lake, an annual summer event launched when I was two years old. Everyone made it, converging from California and various parts of Michigan and distributed among four places on two sides of the lake, but all together nonetheless. The main branches on the family tree: three siblings (my dad and his two sisters). The whole crew: three aunts, three uncles, five cousins (plus three significant others), and four dogs. Here we all are, minus one dog.

Cornhole was the centerpiece of this year's family photo and of the week. Despite what you may be thinking, it's a very wholesome game. Quite literally. The bags are stuffed with corn, and the object is to throw them into the holes or at least onto the platform. See? Wholesome and hole-some.

We spent a good chunk of the time constructing our own set, so we no longer need to borrow one from the Ohio neighbors (from whence the game made its way to northern Michigan). It was quite the team effort. Dad and Uncle Steve built the two boxes, Uncle Steve wielded the paintbrush, Deanne and I sewed the eight bags, I stuffed them and hand-sewed them all closed with help from a chapstick-lid thimble (ouch!), and Tom, Deanne, and I designed the "Burt Lake Cornhole Club" stencil, with Deanne as spray paint master. The bags make a very distinctive thwack when they hit the hollow plywood box, and that sound punctuated every evening, the bass line to the music (Neil Diamond, mostly) piped outside via the new porch speakers that Jeff spent most of the first two days wiring, with help from almost all of the rest of us. I believe our family may have a Project Problem, says the one who spent the whole two weeks prior to this vacation painting my upstairs (still less than half done) and then returned home to a to-do list that just keeps growing longer.

Oh well, we did relax a bit. We cousins went on a boat ride on a cloudy day that became downright chilly once we were on the water, in the wind.

Actually, there were lots of enjoyable activities. The weather was really quite nice, most of the days. We swam, we sailed, we kayaked, we played water frisbee and water whiffle ball until the taped-together bat broke. We float-boated to the North End and Tom, Michael, and I dunked ourselves in ice-cold Carp Creek for old times' sake. We ate corn-on-the-cob and made s'mores at a bonfire. Mom, Deanne, Maisie and I went for a hike at "the gorge" and gathered raspberries by the handful along the fern-lined boardwalks. Tom, Deanne, and I dragged sleeping bags out to the dock one night and watched the Perseids shooting across a starry sky until we fell asleep, with Maisie curled in a ball at my feet the whole night. We sang (not so tunefully) to tunes from the player piano until the wee hours one evening.

But here was a real highlight: An up-north evening at the Cheboygan County Fair. We watched pick-up trucks (and a school bus) roar around a dusty racetrack at the Tough Truck competition. We admired the cows and sheep in the 4-H barns. Michael even won a giant dinosaur at the ring toss on the arcade. Good times!

(Thanks to Deanne and Tom for taking most of these photos, and to Brittany Morales for capturing the family shot.)