White Rabbits Don't Die

Years ago some little kids, namely Rob, Liz, Britt, Jane, and Jackson would chant the incantation "white rabbits don't die" when our campfire got smokey.  This was supposed to keep the smoke away from them.  Let's just say their hocus pocus wasn't always successful.  Read "wasn't always" to mean "never."  Bob & I have a campfire each night and the smoke still travels whichever way it pleases.

This morning I walked around the campground.

The water was glass-like which allowed me to get these shots.  I'm particularly pleased with the slide one.

Wherever we travel, I look at real estate ads.  I thought I found our perfect cabin on Potato Lake, but it looks like we'll continue to use Vagabond as our base when we come here.

If we bought this, we would be buying it from the CEO of Sprint.  The $5,250,000 isn't the deal breaker.  Okay, it is, but there's another problem.  For this price there is no view of the lake from any room in the house.

We went to Bemidji today.  When I was a kid, long before I knew about Rotary or about the amazing things Rotary clubs and Rotary International do, I knew about Bemidji and its gigantic Paul Bunyon and Babe,  Neighbors took their kids there in the early '60s and it was as exotic as anywhere I could imagine at the time.

So when our kids were little, I was thrilled to bring them to Bemidji.  What impressed them the most?  It wasn't the size of these two, but rather Paul's gigantic fingernail clippings.  It's strange what kids remember.

The Nelsons recommended a place to eat in Bemidji, the 209, and I had the best burger of my life there.  We watched Olympic coverage as we ate, the first of the Olympics we have seen other than the opening ceremony.  We head home tomorrow and I am going to binge-watch the rest of the Olympics.

We walked for a couple of miles in Bemindji State Park part of  which was a bog walk.

Before we got to the bog, we had a really pretty forest walk.

We saw red pines...

... and I mistook aspens for birch.   I know better now.

We were on a boardwalk with the bog below us.  When we were in Ireland we wanted to go on a bog walk and we found the right place - almost!  We could find signs for it from all four directions, but we couldn't find it in the center area.  Here we saw the peat bog.

The boardwalk is made from a compound which includes recycled milk cartons.

Here's why we needed to be on a walkway.

Nothing in the bog is blooming now, but in early summer orchids and lady slipper would be two of the flowers to spot.  Pitcher plants bloom then too.  Here are the seed pods of pitcher plants.

This bog has an outlet to Big Bog Lake.  How imaginative is that?

The bog has a very different temperature than the areas around it.

Later in the day I spent time on Park Rapids' Main Street and I'll tell you more about that tomorrow.