Tourist-Ville

I really do love living where I do, most of the time. I live where people vacation, I live where people buy million dollar lake homes to live in for a few weeks out of the year, I live in a very touristy location. It is a great location and has a ton of perks of being here. We get all sorts of amenities because we have so many tourists come through our area.

I was aware of this as this past week we were up in northern Wisconsin in the Apostle Islands, I imagine that those folks feel much of the same way that we do. I wish I could help out the tourists some and remind them that they don't have to haul their big boats with big trailers and their new trucks and park across nine parking spots at the grocery store and Target.

I welcome our touristy friends, I want to share that which we love with everyone, however, I wish I could some how post a sign that says something along the lines of "remember some people live here full time, work here full time, and live where you vacation."

For those of us who live in the lakes area, we alter the way we live in the summer. We get groceries Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday and we would never consider going out to eat Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. We avoid the main roads and travel back roads and dirt roads to make space for you and we try to be as friendly as we can.

So dear tourists - enjoy the lakes, land, and state parks as much as we do, but please respect them. Keep your zebra muscle infested boats out of the waters, pick up your trash, and have a marvelous vacation.

Gilbert Lake

Since moving to Minnesota I have realized that Minnesota has several things that South Dakota does not, one of them being tons and tons of lakes. I will always be a South Dakotan at heart, even if I am misplaced in one of the other 49 states, none the less I must move on. Anyways. Recently I bought my first kayak, she is beautiful, a Wilderness Systems Pungo 120. I love her, not only is she a beautiful boat but she is lime green, making said boat even more beautiful! I have recently fallen in love with kayaking. Last summer was rough because I lived in Minnesota and saw all of these beautiful lakes and had no way to get out on them, other than a random invite from someone else with a boat. This spring I cured that problem and bought a kayak and I love being out on the water.

As you can probably tell from the photo above, Dakota also loves the water. She managed to sit in the front of the kayak for about 45 minutes before she became all too restless to sit in the kayak any longer and jumped out. She needs a bit more training but I think eventually she will be an awesome little kayaker - or maybe a rider would be a better description of what Dakota does.

Marc and I have decided that we need to paddle in every lake in Crow Wing County Minnesota. Now coming from South Dakota this at first seemed like a super simple goal and something we could potentially accomplish this summer but then as we began thinking about it and doing a little bit of research we have found out that there are actually a few hundred lakes in this area, moving our goal from to paddling in them all this summer to paddling in them all in the next five years or so. We need to find a Crow Wing County map with all the lakes on them so we can mark off which ones we have paddled together.

Saturday we crossed the first lake off the list: Gilbert Lake. This one maybe hard to top. It was a beautifully sized lake, not too big nor not too small and it had lots of bays all around it. Although in terms of ideal I did wish it was a little bigger not a ton but some would be nice. From what we know of this lake most of the residents on this lake are local so the lake hardly had any boats on it, we maybe saw two boats on the lake while we were out - and it was even a Saturday afternoon on a beautiful day. We did see a mamma loon and her three baby loons who couldn't be much more than about a week old while we were paddling and mamma loon let us get a pretty close look at her and her babies, but daddy loon quickly got possessive of his pretty family and we paddled on.

I think I will start to rate the lakes on a scale from one to ten, with then being the top and one being the bottom. I would easily give Gilbert Lake a 9.5 out of 10. I deducted a half point because I wish it was a little bigger, Marc and I easily paddled around the whole lake in the afternoon.