voyageurs national park

Have you ever done something that sounded so cool in theory, then ended up being totally not what you expected, and you would never voluntarily do that thing again but you're still glad you did it in the first place?

Yeah.

Way back at the beginning of the year, when I was stuck in the absolute purgatory known as recovery from foot surgery, I did the thing I do every time I have a bad day (or a good day, or really any kind of day in between): I started planning an imaginary vacation. And since Voyageurs is the closest national park that we hadn't visited yet, I started looking there. And then I made shocking discovery, which I texted to Mike in all caps:

Holli: Mike.

Holli: MICHAEL.

(Mike was in a truck at work, and he saw me all caps his name, and he turned to his coworker and said, "Oh shit. I must be in trouble but I have no idea why.")

Holli: It has come to my attention that you can rent a HOUSEBOAT in Voyageurs National Park and spend days tooling around on the absolutely massive lakes there. [link to the houseboat place]

So at their next break, Mike looked at the link I sent him, and then he shared it with his coworkers, and then they all got very excited and in an uncharacteristic fit of spontaneous decisioning, Mike texted me to BOOK THAT HOUSEBOAT for Memorial weekend. And not being a fool, I hit book with a quickness before he could change his mind.

And now we're back home after three nights on a houseboat on Rainy Lake, having seen lots and lots of the watery parts of Voyageurs but very little of the land (to be fair, Voyageurs is 218,055 acres, and 84,000 of those acres are water; there are 500ish islands, most of which are teeny-tiny so do they even count as land?). And we have learned a few things: 

1. We stink at fishing (final score Mike + Hols 0, fish infinity). It's fun tho. There's a possibility that using poles and lures that are literally older than we are contributed to this, but all the other people we came across had no luck either, so maybe it wasn't just our failure.

2. There is no amount of bug spray and no set of screens secure enough to ward off the black flies and mosquitoes of northern Minnesota. I wear shoes literally every waking hour (I have to since I had surgery, ugh I hate it) and we wrapped up in several layers of blankets during the cold nights, and STILL I have bites between my toes. And everywhere else.

3. Driving around on a boat is great, but spending every single hour on one is maybe not our thing. The houseboat spots are on the tiny islands, so no place to hike etc. There is a bike trail that I really wanted to ride, and we even schlepped our bikes all the freaking way up to the Canadian border in anticipation, but alas, there was just no way to make it work logistically, so the bikes had to stay in the car while we were out on the boat, and there wasn't time after we docked.

4. If you're going to try to run a cpap on a marine battery using an adapter, you might want to test it before you boat out to a spot, tie up your boat, eat dinner, and watch the sun go down late. Whoops.

5. Did I mention the bugs? Seriously, I need to invest in some of those electronic bug catcher things before we go anywhere else.

Overall, it was a really interesting experience. Mike learned how to drive a houseboat and navigate nautical maps and tie up at each spot for the night! I was an adequate copilot! Also I read five entire books because there wasn't much else to do. And that was actually really nice. We have so much to do each day that it feels like we never slow down and take a breath, so having three days to just hang out together, with nowhere to go and no responsibilities, was a real luxury. And listen, I'm not saying we would never go back to Voyageurs. I think we would! It's just that instead of staying on a houseboat, we would plan a land-based vacation and maybe rent a pontoon for a day to go tooling around like we did at Pictured Rocks. I think that would be an excellent vacation.

BONUS CONTENT: While we were gone, Henry put all that aggrieved youngest child energy to use by starting to call Liam and Max "lil bro." It makes them SO MAD. Or maybe I should say "Oh no, Lil Bro is PRESSED."