Say What !!

It's SUNDAY you say?

Well,

then we'll just fiddle with
these sticks for a while
and try not to fall in!

Incidentally,
since this photo was taken
60 years ago,
these boys are all retirement age now.

Can you guess who they are?

The Package Tour

You know the old addage,
"A picture says a thousand words"?
Sometimes you can capture a day
in just a few, well-placed photographs.

Because there are certain benchmarks that define
every trip to BSL
lets start at the very beginning
(it's a very good place to start)
with the actual road trip up to Big Star.

Tum dee dum,
we're tootling northward for about an hour
before we turn west onto 19 Mile Road,
which bridges the much busier highways
called US 131 and M 37,
and suddenly we're immersed in 1950s Americana.
Our trip even includes a one room schoolhouse.

This one's called Big Jackson School.
Big Jackson itself is just a crossroads
that consists of a school
and a church.
Yup.
That's Big Jackson.


The countryside on 19 Mile is gorgeous.
Lots of gently rolling hills,
grazing cattle, burbling creeks,
farmyards with carefully tended flower gardens,
big red barns that say "Cousineau and Sons"
and hay bales.

The 21st century version of a hay bale

resembles a giant, Euell Gibbons-type
Little Miss Debbie Cake Roll.


And then, naturlich, for our daily dose
of Calvinist guilt,
the ubiquitous roadside chapel.

Let's motor on, shall we?
After our arrival at BSL
we can hardly wait to go
deer-shinin' and scope out
the current deer population.

To make it a true two-fer,
we usually go shining on the way
to another de rigeur pit-stop,
Jones' Homemade Ice Cream.

In addition to its unparalleled ice cream,

Jones' boasts a kind of
in-shop museum that chronicles
very important events in the history of
Baldwin, Idlewild, Marlborough
and Lake County in general.
If I were a teacher, I definitely would
schedule a field trip here.

In the handsomely appointed dining area,
Dave VH and Tom Hofman find plenty to laugh about

despite the towering inferno occurring
just above their heads.


Sometimes we are lucky and our BSL stay
coincides with a VERY SPECIAL OCCASION
called TROUTARAMA.

Troutarama, like all things American,
has very little to do with trout,
and a lot to do with drinking alcohol.

And what is a 'rama without
a Ferris Wheel?


Now we're all very tuckered out
from our first eventful day at BSL.
After we return to our respective cottages,
lie about how many deer we spotted,
how many flavors of ice cream we ate,
how many misspelled road signs we saw,
we collapse into our beds
under the eaves,
and listen to the tree branches
rustle in the wind,
and the acorns plink* plink* plink*
across the roof,
and then we fall asleep.
Priceless.