Catching up

The canoe trip:
OK, so two weeks ago (August 11) Rob and Carrie drove up here, arriving late on Friday. Sandy had class on Saturday, so the three of us had the day to do other stuff.
Rob and Carrie met a couple of friends from St. Paul for breakfast. I spent almost two hours cleaning the inside of my car for the trip. I'm not sure I had ever really carefully cleaned this car and I've had it over three years now. Lucy rides in it a lot so it was kind of filthy.
After Rob and Carrie got back from breakfast we started getting everything organized for the trip. We made a big pile of stuff in the living room and then went to run some errands.
First we went to an army surplus store because Rob wanted to get some pants to wear on the trip. We probably would've stayed there longer and played with the hand grenades and whatnot but the guy behind the counter looked like he might bayonet you if you pissed him off. Rob didn't find any pants he liked but I did, they're plain green army type pants with the little adjustable slider things on the sides in case I turn into a fatso.
Then we had to go get biodiesel for the trip. I filled up my car and some 5 gallon fuel cans. Then we went to the grocery store.
Rob was very spazzy at the grocery store. Carrie and I had a list and we were trying to work off that, Rob kept showing up with weird things like Shark Bites or inventing alternate meal plans that would have left Sandy with nothing to eat but scalloped potatoes which she doesn't really like. He did occasionally have a good idea too like the Lipton chicken-y noodle thing to which we added a pouch of precooked chicken.
So right before we got to the checkout I said "let's see who can guess closest to the actual price." I thought Carrie would win since she seemed to be actually paying attention to how much things cost, and she was on the Price is Right once. I guessed around $120, and I think she was $10-15 below that, Rob guessed $168 which was obviously too high. Well it turns out the bill was $165.69 (I just checked the receipt) needless to say Rob was hard to be around for about 5 minutes.
After we got back to the house we went into high gear getting all the equipment packed up and put into the car. With four of us plus Lucy in the Jetta Wagon there wasn't a lot of Room for equipment. We had pretty much every cubic inch filled.
By this time it was about 5 o'clock. Sandy got home and had a couple more items to pack, Rob and Carrie tried to do a little last minute online banking and we were off.
As soon as we got on the interstate I remembered that I'd left the cooler of refrigerated food in the refrigerator. We took the roundabout way back to the house, I grabbed the food and four ice cream sandwiches and we were (once again) off.
We stopped at a Culvers in Forest Lake or somewhere to get root beers for everyone and dinner for Sandy (the rest of us had gotten food at the Byerly's deli). Then it was pretty much a straight shot to the end of the Sawbill Trail.
Where there were no open campsites.
It was about 11pm, we drove through the campground a few times to make sure we hadn't missed an open site. We had, but a more opportunistic car following us snatched it before we could. After watching a couple of young deer try to figure out how to avoid our headlights we drove back down the trail a mile to an old logging road.
I drove in about 100 yards and dragged the car over a giant pointed rock that apparently didn't do any damage. It sounded bad though. We stopped there and pitched our tents right in the road and went to sleep.

Here's an interesting little tidbit about Sawbill Canoe Outfitters I found.
http://www.restroomratings.com/reviews/restroom347.htm
I know, I know, just copy and paste it. The Mac won't show me the button for adding a link...

Here's a picture of our nephew Zach, he was up for a visit last weekend.
He really seems to enjoy standing in the back yard looking at things, as long as he can keep a deathgrip on somebody's hand. He's not a huge fan of the solo standing at this point, although he seems to be able to manage it ok.

Clarifications:
OK, first of all that picture in the last post, the one with the Beaver in it? That's not a canoe under the plane, it's the firefighting tank. My bad. A canoe would be somewhat longer and more symmetrical.
Any guesses as to how contained the fire is as of this morning? No, not 90%. No, not 95%... That's right, 92%! They're very precise this Minnesota fire management team. It seems like they've been removing fire crews at a rapid rate since the end of last week although the crew is still more than a couple hundred. I think they're pretty comfortable with the situation overall.
Betsy is still very confused about the canoes and how they're used to fight the fire. The picture of the boat jetting water from last week didn't clarify anything apparently. Here's what I know:
Some crews were flown in but most paddled, even the ones that flew used canoes to get around once they were in the wilderness.
Everyone gets a canoe orientation.
They did have hoses and portable pumps which sucked lake water for fighting fires.
I'm pretty sure they did not have any sort of canoe mounted water cannon, as cool as that would be. I think the picture of the boat with the water jet was probably on Seagull lake which is accessible by road.
The canoes were just for transportation.
Mostly I think they used shovels and pick-axes to break up and spread out the fuel although they seemed pretty excited about those fire-line explosives, I think there were special crews for that.

I don't know what I'm going to write about after this fire is out.
Today the moved the containment percentage up to 85. It seems like with the rain they've been getting there isn't any real spreading of the fire, just smoldering. They're actually pulling out many of the firefighters and their equipment, tomorrow they're transferring control of the fire from the Pacific Northwest National Incident Management Team 2 back to the Minnesota Team A Incident Management Team. The Pacific Northwest guys are some wildfire ringers they brought in when things were looking bad.
The obnoxious heat has gone away for the moment, the high today was around 85. Last night with the outside temperature in the lower 60s and operation heat suck going we got positively cold. It was a nice change.