Voyageurs National Park - Jour Un

Bonjour, mes amis!

Due to my desire to ramble and tell details, I'm splitting this into two posts, one for Friday and the other for Saturday. We left early today (Sunday) so there's not much to tell.

Friday morning I woke up bright and early. Around four a.m., actually, although I didn't get out of bed until five a.m. We left ten minutes after six and during the five hour drive to Lake Kabetogama we stopped once to have brunch around ten or eleven a.m at boring old Perkins. We fueled up with a station that gets its gas from BP. I felt a little guilty.

As we turned onto the road that would take us to the resort we were staying at, my parents stopped at this giant fish thing. You know, one of those photo-op things where it's 9817392871928372 feet in the air and you're supposed to get on it? Yeah, no. I'm afraid of heights. They were kinda mad, I think.

Continuing on, we arrived at the little resort. When I say resort, I don't mean giant fancy hotel, I mean a cute little office building with some boats and cabins/trailer spots for rent. (Later it would prove to be gorgeous. You can see the live webcam of the dock I love here.) It was cloudy and drizzling as we put up the tent, and the rain kept building. I went for a little walk before we wandered into some tourist spots and stores looking for trinkets to buy. One of them had an awesome compass but I was talked out of getting it, and ended up buying a map of all of Voyageurs National Park. Pretty exciting start to my day.

Then we went to the Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary. It was so cool! You get bused into the site where there is a two-story tall deck, complete with a gift shop, and then you can see the black bears that wander in.

There were five cubs in this one tree. So ador

able.

There were an estimated 30 bears in the area while we

were there. This was just one little section of the area.

Story has it, Vince was a logger who was just trying to earn some money for his poor family, and turned out to be very good at it. He'd hire loggers to work for him, and he'd cook sourdough pancakes for them in the morning. They then went out to work, but when Vince returned, his house was being raided by hungry bears! He shot hundreds of bears, so many he lost count. Finally when he thought they were all gone, he went back to his house only to discover more bears. So he changed his plan of attack.

Instead of trying to kill the bears, Vince set out some sourdough bread just for the bears, away from his home. It worked. He quickly became attached to the bears and kept feeding them well into his old age. As he got older, he started to worry about what would happen to his bears after he passed away, so he and some others founded The American Bear Association.

Since it was a good cause, I ended up buying a comfy new hoodie and a new book bag for the coming school year (Pray I never wear my sweater to school, with the matching bag!).

We didn't do much else that evening. We tried to have a bonfire but everything was too soggy, it rained literally all day. I went out to the dock and laid on a bench to look at the stars. They were gorgeous, and I saw my first shooting star! Four, to be exact.

À demain,

Mlle Delphine