The Stephwagens: Mini Honeymoon Pt. 2 - Tia and Graham's Cottage on Skeleton Lake!

One of the bittersweet moments at our wedding was saying goodbye to our friends Tia and Graham, who have moved out to New Brunswick for a new job at a private school there. We'll miss them, but it's a great opportunity for them and a great excuse for Tim and I to make plans to visit the east coast! They also graciously offered to let us use their cottage on Skeleton Lake when we have time until they get back late next spring. With Tim teaching Saturdays at Lakefield College, I don't know how often we'll be able to make that happen, but we're definitely going to try!

We were happy to head up on the Labour Day weekend before Tim started teaching. It's only a couple of hours away if we beat the cottage traffic, which we managed to do on Friday by leaving work early. I was more than a little worried when the rain started pouring down in Bracebridge - we could hardly see the cars ahead of us! That didn't bode well for us canoeing in and of course, Tim hadn't brought a tarp. We tried to find somewhere to buy one in Bracebridge, but no luck. Luckily by the time we got to the launch point on Skeleton Lake (their cottage is water access only) the rain had tapered off to almost nothing. We (and by we I mean Tim) are chronic overpackers. We were only going for three nights! Why did we need this much stuff! We had a cooler, two big bags of food, a bag of booze, a bag of mix, the laptop, two duffel bags of clothes, and the camera and tripod. Our canoe is a beast - almost three feet wide in the middle, fully fifteen feet long, weighs around 90 lbs. Even with that kind of transport, we were LOW in the water. I wasn't sure how far it was to the cottage and, I'll admit, was a bit nervous. Skeleton Lake isn't your typical Muskoka cottage lake. Rather than being a glacial lake (long and narrow), it's a meteor crater, so it is deep and wide. At one point we came over a shoal and I remarked to Tim about how much better I felt when I could see the bottom. His completely NOT reassuring response was along the lines of, "Oh, actually, we're still really deep here - it's just that the water is so clear!" Thanks, tips. That makes me feel MUCH better. Just like his comment about how the water was much rougher than he had thought it would be and that we were moving up and down in about six inch swells with only four inches of water clearance at the middle of the canoe. I told him six inches was an exaggeration (that's what she said!) so he proceeded to bounce up and down in the back to make it worse. Jerk.

The rain pouring down in Bracebridge.

We did manage to arrive safely after about a half hour of paddling, which is really short. It's also a great paddle - the shoreline is beautiful and the water really is crystal clear. So when you can see the bottom, you can see everything. We spent the evening getting situated, relaxing, having a few drinks, and having lots of cheese!

Did we pack enough for one weekend?

Don't worry, one of those is mine - a gift from Carley and Pete for the wedding!

Sad face! Tim knocked me into a wall when we were moving a mattress. Plus I have a weird mohawk bump thing going on in my ponytail. That makes everyone sad.

Crostini for cheese!

Mmmmm - Grey Owl!! I don't care if you think it looks gross, I don't know why everyone feels they need to tell me that. The external coating is not mold, it's vegetable ash. And with my homemade cherry mustard, even Tim liked this and he is NOT a funky or a goat cheese type of person. And yes, insulting my favourite cheese is somewhat like insulting my as-yet-unconceived firstborn child.

Great selection! Clockwise from the crostini: aged gouda, cherry mustard, Bothwell smoked cheddar, Grey Owl, Hatch Chili mustard, an aged sheep's milk cheese, maple ice jelly, pear jelly. The cheese and pear jelly is from Chasing the Cheese, while the hatch chili mustard and maple ice jelly are from Firehouse Gourmet.

Delicious cheese face.

While people elsewhere may have been cursing the cold, wet weather on Saturday, Tim and I were loving it. We slept in, made a leisurely breakfast. Tim continued to read Shantaram (looonnnggg book, he's been picking through it for most of the year) while I powered through the backlog of magazines I've been accumulating and not reading for the last couple of months due to wedding planning. It started to clear up in the late afternoon, so we enjoyed some dock time. Drank champagne with the gorgeous blown glass goblets Tia made us as part of our wedding gift. After making dinner we headed to the neighbouring cottage, which is owned by Graham's parents. They were having a big shindig with family and other cottagers. It always amazes me, how small the world is. Out of the dozen or so adults there, one was a geologist who had worked extensively in Nunavut, and two of them had visited or lived in Morocco. We had a great discussion about the north and relations in Africa with all the problems right now in Egypt, as well as talking about Syria. When the sun started to go down, most of us went back to Tia and Graham's dock to watch a really beautiful sunset. Tim cracked open his scotch and shared it around. After the sun had gone down and everyone had left, Tim and I couldn't stop exclaiming over how perfect a day it had been. We were just so relaxed. Hard to remember the crazy amount of stress we were under not too long ago.

Opening the first of two bottles of champagne we drank this weekend!

Mimosas in the morning!

Tim attempting to make guacamole.

Guacamole fail. Icky avocado.

Our incredible new customized Badger paddles!! We loved this wedding gift from Jess, Mike, Tobey, and Andrew!

Badger, badger, badger, badger - MUSHROOM, MUSHROOM!

Twitter at the cottage? Tim's in heaven.

Frog One of Five.

Frog Two of Five!

Couldn't believe the perfect reflection of Tim in the frog pond.

Tim posted this to Facebook with the caption, "Reflective Pond-ering." Har-har.

Watching the frogs!

What a gorgeous day!

Rum and magazines!

Oh, the bracing lake water really makes a man feel alive!

"Come hug me!" "No." "Pleeeeaaaassseeee?" "No." "You'll like it!" "No."

Falling over face!

Whale tattoo! Wedding ring! Lake!

Enjoying our champagne in the afternoon.

Tia is so great - aren't these goblets amazing?!

Enjoying the afternoon.

The start of an absolutely gorgeous sunset.

I wish we saw sunsets like this every day!

Cassiopeia.

The big dipper!

Sunday was the nicest day we had, so we got up earlier to enjoy the sunshine on the official last long weekend of summer! We canoed out to a couple of small islands that show the edge of the impact crater. The first was really strange - just covered in seagull carcasses and bones. It was actually really creepy. The second was a lot smaller and obviously was where all the live seagulls went, because the entire island was painted in long streaks of bird poop. Ew. We didn't get off there. We paddled over to the far east shore of the lake and worked our way back along the shoreline. Tim caught three progressively smaller rock bass. I wanted to hike up the one cliff face to where there was an Inukshuk perched on the top, but there were big no trespassing signs and I'm a wussy when it comes to that stuff.

Tim trying to get me to swim again. The water was beautiful. Just too cold. No thanks!

Tim rounding the point.

The water is actually twenty or thirty feet deep here, but Tim found a huge boulder to stand on.

Canoeing to the islands!

That is a nice paddle you have there!

Fishing, but no luck.

Here, Tim, you paddle. I'll be lazy and take squinty-eyed photos of myself.

Yay, Tim finally caught a fish!

Oooo, he has another one on!

And it's a monster!!

This lake is huge, it has to have bigger fish than this!

. . . Nope.

I spent another afternoon on the dock with a rum and coke and more of my magazines before Matt and Teri came down from the cottage they were visiting near Sudbury. The boys went fishing with no more success than Tim had had earlier while Teri and I hung out on shore and caught up (not that we hadn't just seen Matt and Teri on Thursday). After the boys got back we made a gigantic supper of BBQd steak and vegetables and corn on the cob. Matt almost immediately passed out into a meat coma, but we roused him long enough for Tim and I to lose at Pictionary. It was an easy concession because Matt and Teri are MUCH better artists than Tim and I.

Tim continuing to fish after we got back to the cottage. He got his line stuck and had to take the canoe out to get it out. Only he didn't take any paddles with him.

Again with the rum and magazines. This is my ideal life.

After Matt and Teri got there, at least Tim had someone enthusiastic to fish with.

Teri and I would rather enjoy the late summer sun.

Awww - family cuddles. It was so exciting that the baby was moving!

We made too much.

Sunday dawned extremely crappy again. The boys got up early to go fishing, but I just went back to sleep. Matt made us a big breakfast once they got back with bacon, eggs, and steak. A man's breakfast! We all just vegged most of the day. Played puzzles, read, I blogged and worked on the computer. There was a strong northwest wind coming in and we were worried about how we'd get back to the arena. It did not look canoeable, which had been the plan. Luckily Graham's parents were okay with Tim driving them into the marina in their boat and then coming back for the rest of us. Matt volunteered to sit in the canoe as we towed it back to the marina. It was SO rough! As long as he stayed in the wake of the boat and didn't do anything ridiculous, it was perfectly safe. However, it's Matt and that just isn't the way he does things!! At one point he gave us all a heart attack when he managed to rock himself out of the wake. He almost flipped, and then when Tim stopped so we could get him back in the wake, his momentum pushed him into the back of the boat and he almost turned over again! Ah! Rollwagens!