A few people at the gym were organizing a Wisconsin River trip. Overnight and all. So of course we signed on.
The response wasn't huge but it ended up being 5 of us for the weekend.
On Saturday morning we drove to Sauk City (the birthplace of Culvers!) and put our boats in at the VFW. Right after the last dam on the river until it merges with the Mississippi river 92 miles later.
Mackenzie is so excited she couldn't wait to get in the water!
Sun was out and the river was full... of people. A beautiful weekend brings out the masses. We needed to rent one boat and that outfitter said all 130 canoes they own were on the water this weekend. And they are not the only outfitter on the river. Can you believe that?
We set out at about 11 by the time the shuttles were all set up. Next stop? who cares. Seriously, thats how this works. The banks of the river are more often private property and not allowed to be landed on but the sand bars in the river are fair game for anyone.
A few hours in we are passing huge groups with 3-5 canoes tied together, were were calling them party barges. People were stopped on the sandbars swimming, drinking, playing games and eating. We stopped for a quick swim on one of them for a while. The day was almost cloudless so the water was refreshing.
We continued downstream until about 3:30 when we decide its time to lay claim to some land. So we found a few spots and decided on on particularly flat beach and made it our own.
We had brought some fire wood but scouted for more and found washed up logs and someones previous campsite that had left extra firewood. Score.
We unloaded the boats, set up our camp sites and started a fire for dinner. Since we only had 5 people it made it easy to take care of food. I marinated a 2 pound flank steak then froze it the night before. It was now defrosted and ready to be cooked over an open flame. I had my mini camp grate and lets just say it works great.
We sauted up some onions and red peppers, cut some limes and broke out the tortillas. All on our makeshift table.
After dinner we all sat for a while in the shade of a tent, because the sun was still hot and even sith sunscreen we were a bit crispy and tired. Once the sun went down behind the trees everyone enjoyed the relief and we moved back to the fire for the evening.
Here is our motley crew
We burned though a lot of that wood before turning in around 10:30.
The next morning it was hazy and that was fine for me. Had breakfast of egg in a bag omelettes. Lucky for us the sun was behind clouds for a good part of the day so it was a little relief on the sunburn. It even rained on us for a few minutes.
We bad it to Peck's landing about 24 miles from where we started. It was a long trek thats for sure. Everyone was exhausted and by the time we were all loaded up it was after one. Back into Sauk City for Culver's and then home by about 5 PM.
Whats a great weekend outdoors.
Here is a little video that google photos put together automatically for me. Turned out pretty nice.
Here is a map of our trip.
