mia ~

So you think I've gone MIA ~ wrong ... I'm still here ... it's just that I've been super busy.  Busy picking berries and keeping up with the kids celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, camping and a class reunion.  I've been making jelly and canning pickles.  All kinds of distractions going on :)

Dear Hubby had four days off from work and we were on a mission ... picking berries.  It takes LOTS of berries for me to keep up with my jamming.

At Nelson's Berry Farm in Westboro you can pick blueberries as big as quarters.  

We picked 5 gallons of them!  That will make a BIG batch of jelly :)

They have several varieties in their fields. 

 Those berries sure make for a yummy pie too ~

... and some scrumptious jam.

Then we headed into the woods.  We drove for miles through the Chequamegon National Forest and Nicolet National Forest in search of wild black berries.  I just hate buying berries when The Good Lord has them growing in His Garden ... all you have to do is take the time to go and harvest them.

We drove down a lot of gravel roads ...

some of them were pretty narrow ...  more like ATV trails instead of vehicle roadways.

We went uphill and down ...

pass creeks ...

choked off with water hyacinths ...

pass little pot hole lakes ...

This was a nice stopping place for our picnic lunch.

We found some black cherries ... so we picked a gallon of those.

a stem of wild black cherries

BUT .. I needed black berries, not cherries ... but we just couldn't find a good picking of them.

Finally ~ we hit a good patch.  Just follow the bear trails and you don't get too stuck and stabbed by the thorny brush.  When you find good black berry brush in the wild in my neck of the woods you also find signs of bear.  It just makes the berry picking more interesting :) ... a little competition between you and nature to see who gets to the berries first.  We found quite a few patches along the way; but the bear had beaten us to most of them.

We picked and picked and even went back a second day and picked some more.
The picture of them on the stem are pretty small.  We found some that were as big as your thumb and hanging like grapes.

All total ... we ended up with 8 gallons of them! That's a lot of black berries ... but I'll use them up.

We also found a nice batch of highbush cranberries.  They aren't ripe yet but I picked a branch of them anyways.  We'll be heading back into the woods in a few weeks to get some of those if the bear don't beat us to them.

I wish I could take a break today and just enjoy the view out my window ...

... or just sit out on the deck and sip tea and watch the hummingbirds ~

 

... but I have a big bucket of cucumbers sitting in the kitchen waiting to get turned into pickles :)

~~~~~~~~***~~~~~~~~

1 Thessalonians 4:11-12

 Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, ¹²so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

Until next time ...

So it goes in my neck of the woods.

~mel

campin'~

We spent another day with the girls out at the Twin Lakes campground.  It was a lot of fun swimming and playing card games with them.  Amanda had made "the rule" once you start a game you can NOT quit it no matter what ... you had to play all the way through.  Well.... I don't know if you're familiar with the card game Phase 10 ... but after 2 hours of it,  I have to admit, I was feeling about the same as Brooke was. She's sitting at the end of the table... the one sighing ... "are we done yet?"  Playing that game also reminded us how Amanda (our oldest granddaughter, holding the fan of cards) got her nickname from Grandpa ... he calls her Pokey. lol

The kids got me on the bike again.  They were having a pretty good laugh over the matter that the seat mysteriously disappears when I get on it ~ I told them I used to sing alto but now can sing soprano.  Mercy!! They sure do make bike seats smaller than I remember them being.

Even Grandpa Slim got on the bike and made a few loops around the campground :)  Does the law about drinking and driving apply to bicycles?? Put down your beer Grandpa!!

Bailey has finally mastered riding without the training wheels over the weekend.  She was one happy camper.

We went on a few nature walks ...

doing the board walk again

checking an old road bed for berries and mushrooms

we found a nice tree full of service berries

aka. juneberries

Isn't this a pretty little pic of the second lake through the trees:

Our strangest find was this ~

Somebody let their reading glasses laying on a balsam tree branch.  We left them there for some nearsighted bear.

 

Thanks for coming by my blog and spending a little piece of your day with me :)

Until next time ...

So it goes in my neck of the woods.

~mel

camping ~

I took a ride this evening with my daughter Sara (Dear Hubby was working and couldn't go) out to the Twin Lake's Campground in the Chequamegon National Forest.  I haven't been out there in years.  We camped out there a few times with our girls when they were little.  This time we were going to visit my other daughter, Staci and her family who are camping there.

The campground was empty.  She has the whole place to herself.  

It's a rustic campground.  Kind of like the one at Connor's Lake that I talked about in a prior post.  No showers or electric hook ups.  It's out in the middle of no where land ... beautiful and quiet.  My kind of place :) to pitch a tent or set up a camp for a couple of days.

It has a nice black topped road with no traffic on it ... a good place for a little girl to learn how to ride her bike without training wheels.

This campground has fond memories for Staci.  It's one of the campgrounds that she worked at when she was in the WCC (the Wisconsin Conservation Corp).  One of the projects that she worked on was putting in the board walk through a swampy area to the second lake.  I went for a walk on it this evening ... hoping not to run into a bear along the way.

It starts out as a little path leading off the black topped road. 

Once you get down a little hill towards the bottom the board walk begins.

 

It winds through the woods and across the lowland.

There's all kinds of moss and ferns and berries to see along the way.

It winds and turns around the trees ~

~ and ends up here:

the second lake of the Twin Lakes

 

It was so calm and quiet ... not a ripple on the water.

When I got back to the camp from my walk ~ my granddaughter Brooke was showing her patriotism and hanging her flags.

After Brooke finished hanging her pennant we did something that I haven't done in 27 years. 

I went for a bike ride with her!

That's me ~ the blue chunky monkey riding a bike!  

I guess it's true ... once you learn how you'll never forget.  I was a little hesitant after all these years about doing it and having the six knee surgeries and legs that just don't work all the time like I would like them to.  I was ready for a great big gob of gravity to get me; but it didn't happen.  I really had fun!  I'm thinking I'm going to get myself a bike :)

Amanda was so proud of me... and kept saying, "way to go Grandma!"

After the bike riding was over ... the girls asked if it was too late for a swim.  "Of course not" ... was my answer ... "we're camping ... go for it".  They swam until dark.  Now if I was really a brave grannie I would have gone skinny dipping; but I didn't want to shock the poor girls on their first night out in the woods ... maybe tomorrow.

It was a nice way to spend an evening.  Going for a walk, riding the bike, watching my Grandloves swim and sitting around the campfire with my kids again.

Until next time ...

So it goes in my neck of the woods.

~mel