We flew home yesterday from a ten day vacation in Loon Lake, Wisconsin and
Washington D.C. John’s family has a 75-year-old lakeside cottage with
more boats than bedrooms where 17 of us gathered. There
would have been a count of 18 but Jessica was singing in a music festival, which
is why we traveled to Washington. We started our trip on 20 June by flying
from San Francisco to Cleveland, Ohio, to Green Bay, Wisconsin (SFO-CLE-GRB).
I love airport art, such as the delightful huge “paper” airplanes
hanging over a CLE walkway or my favorite SFO sculpture, Deborah
Butterfield’s “Pohina” (cast bronze horse seemingly made from driftwood).
At Loon Lake, we went tubing (riding floats behind a speedboat), fishing, canoeing, paddle boating, and just riding around the lake in the pontoon boat
to see the loons
and ospreys which nest on
half drowned and buggy Osprey Island.
We even took the pontoon boat to dinner at Sigrid’s restaurant at the other
end of the lake. We also spent a day riding the rapids in inner tubes on the
Red River.
This was a big year for wildlife at Loon Lake, including a big
snapping turtle,
a surprising and large toothy
gar (caught in the speed boat’s propeller), deer, herons, cranes,
golden eagles, five loons and five nests of ospreys, plus crawdads,
a toad and a leopard frog, dragonflies and way too many bugs of all sizes.
My mother-in-law Naomi Plocher
has been coming to Loon Lake all of her life. She told us that when she was
very young, there were loons but they went away for over sixty years and did
not start coming back until about four years ago. We did not see any baby
loons this year but the five adults danced in a circle at dusk and then
cried hauntingly all night. We have only ever seen one bear at Loon Lake – the young adult
black bear of two years ago – but the other wildlife seems to
be increasing in number and variety.
On Friday, John and Paul and I flew to Washington D.C. (GRB-CLE-DCA)
to hear Jessica sing as one of the three genii (or
three boys) in Mozart’s opera
The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflote), at
Saltnote Stageworks. Yesterday, we flew home (DCA-MSP-SFO).
Photos follow…
CLE airplanes
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Deborah Butterfield’s “Pohina” at SFO
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Deborah Butterfield’s “Pohina”
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Paul fishing
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Caught a Small Sunfish
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Grandpa Dave and Marty Fishing
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Tubing with a loon
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Paul tubing
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Paul – no hands!
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Four loons at dusk
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Solo loon
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Osprey in nest
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Osprey Island sign
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On Osprey Island
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On Osprey Island
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Black dragonfly
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Green and black dragonfly
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Green dragonfly
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Marty and the Gar
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Snapping turtle
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Red River Crawdad
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Sunset
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Sunset
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Loon Lake Cottage
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Loon Lake Cottage
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Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher
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