Camp Du Nord, part 1: digital

We tried something new this year. During the last week of summer vacation we traveled up to Ely and spent four nights at at rustic cabin on Burntside Lake. 

It has taken me a while to get to this series of posts because 1) Blogger was recently updated and it's become more difficult to format posts anymore in my usual style and 2) I'm waiting to get some film back from development, including about 20 exposures from our time up there.

Camp Du Nord is kind of like a family summer camp. There are activities, like craft making and organized hikes, that you can all do together (or separately), but you can opt out and just relax too. I think those were the four best nights of sleep I've had all year. Maybe it was the fresh air or the break from electronics. That's right--we had no internet for four days.

It was a good way to say farewell to summer.

That said, we had kind of a rough start. The first day was rainy and cold. We had to walk a long way to our first activity and got lost and very wet along the way. The activity was called inkle weaving and it looked like this:

V was not terribly enthused to be there:

But the weaving was therapeutic and gave us something to do with our hands, not having our phones to play with and all.

Omri helped too:

We were able to bring the loom back to our cabin and we managed to finish two six-foot long straps. 

Honestly, if we hadn't had some rainy downtime in the cabin I would have been severely disappointed.

It seems like we had been together a lot since the pandemic started in March, but it wasn't quality time together the way it was at Du Nord.

Love these snuggles:

Of course we got out and about a lot too. This was self-taken during our hike to Little Baldy:

We also went on a canoe ride to an island, but I was too nervous to bring my digital camera on the water. You will need to wait for my film photos to see what that excursion looked like (assuming they turn out).

Omri and I attended a rope making session.

He was happy to get a souvenir... some rope:

Veronica and I took a hike, just the two of us. We saw these two tall trees called The Sentinels:

Under Troll's Bridge:

I was so proud of Veronica for doing the polar bear plunge. She and R jumped into the lake three mornings in a row (including the rainy/cold one) at 7:30 to earn this t-shirt:

The sentry at the beach:

Here's another look at our cabin:

And here's the view from inside:

More to come...