This year, I got to spend my summer at my cabin, in northern Wisconsin. For those of you who don’t know where Wisconsin is, it is in the northern US, and is very close to the Canadian border. Our cabin is a large red building that is at least 80 years old and sits over a body of water called Lake Namakagon.  In the evening the cabin is mainly where people spend their time because it’s a lot bigger, but during the day, people spend their time working and swimming, taking one of our 17 boats, reading etc. Down the hill from us is our boat house, which has two floors (see below). We store the boats on the bottom floor and the upstairs has several bedrooms. The boat house was built by the Spitzer family very recently.

The Spitzer family cabin is in the middle of the woods, so you can imagine that there are tons of wildlife! That’s why we have a trail-cam.

Trail cam:

The trail cam is attached to a tree and is left for week or so. After we retrieve it, we plug the memory card into the computer and everyone gathers around the computer to look at the photos. We mostly see deer, but occasionally see turkeys or raccoons (and sometimes a wolf if we’re lucky). Once, I was going to check the trail cam, I saw a deer, walking 4 feet in front of me! My draw dropped! This year, it was my job to keep track of the camera. I tried putting it on the road, where the deer sleep, but it wasn’t taking photos. Then I tried the Witch’s Woods, and it was a great success, because it is confirmed that deer walk on the path we are working on and, it had a bunch of pictures of deer! Sadly, we forgot to get copies of the photos, but I will try to remember next year.

The witch’s woods are an area of a certain type of hemlock trees that block the sunlight, so there is no vegetation on the forest floor. Since it’s so dark, the myth is that a witch lives in that part of the woods.

Work projects:

The cabin is constantly needing repairs with 20 people here every summer, so everyone has their share of work. This summer I have been rebuilding a crate that covers the well. I reinforced it, painted it rusty red and added new screws to hold it together. I also have renewed 2 trails with the help of my dad and grandpa. I also went on the hot buggy road with my dad and dug rocks out of the road, which was really hard. Some of the rocks were pretty big! With the rocks we collected, we built the first firepit the cabin has ever had! We hope people will use it a lot.

 I think people give some work to kids so they can learn how to drive a screw into a wall, or how to paint or how to build a fire. I am proud of my work, and hopefully there will be more fun projects next year.

This year, my aunt Terry (My grandpas’ youngest sister) has been hard at work with her daughter Jessie recoating the canoe paddles or they will get rotten. They cover it with polyurethane and let them dry.

My grandpa and grandma are also figuring out the house plans for there are house across the bay, and i’m excited for the finished project

My cousins

My cousins Eleanor and Elliot got to visit the cabin this year, and it was a blast! I had never met Eliot before, and he was pretty fun. My cousin Eleanor I have met once before, and already got to know.

Eleanor and Eliot stayed a week with their parents Uncle Brian and Edwidge. We did lots of fishing, swimming and playing. We had a game of monopoly that lasted 5 days!!

Edwidge and Eliot both speak French, so got to talk with them a bit. I hadn’t talked with someone my age since before we left for Borneo back in April, so it was very nice to have him visit. My uncle Brian (My dad’s brother) and Eleanor are very nice and fun. Eleanor likes to go chipmunk hunting and Eliot and I like to go fishing we all love going swimming!

Puppies!

At the cabin, there are lots of people, which tends to be a lot of dogs, but unfortunately not  this year didn’t have that many, but I still had lots of fun with them. The dogs here are: Scout the black lab is a year and a half old. Rufus a border collie is 13 years old. Chewbacca the labradoodle is 6 years old and Ollie who is a  Husky Border Collie mix and is 11 months old. Whenever we would go swimming, the dogs would whine and jumping to try to save us, but would always scratch us. The first time i went swimming with scout, I was just diving around, looking for fishes, and suddenly I saw this big silhouette on the lake bottom, and and as I turned up to look at it, it pawed me in the face!this big black shape came and scratched me in the face! It turns out it was scout trying to save me, but it was impossible to be mad at her though, because she was doing it out of excitement and enthusiasm, not hate. You can see photos of them playing below.

Rufus is an old dog so with him I mostly pet and scratch. He has wispy black and white hair, and is always in a good spirit. He is almost 14, and does have problems going  Scout is a retrieving maniac. The only interest of hers is to swim and catch her frisbee. she has very dark black fur and it it is extremely pointy. She has eager brown eyes and is full of energy. Chewy has curly black hair and is full of anxiety. We sometimes cant find him because he blends in with rug so well.  Ollie is a puppy, so I tried and failed to use up his energy in running and biking. He has brown and white hair and has a pink nose. His eyes are yellow and look like a cosmos shape. He has a very big head too. 

Norway in Wisconsin

As some of you know, Europeans began coming to North America nearly 500 years ago. The appeal of farmland and escape from there poor lives was irresistible. In Wisconsin and Minnesota, many Norwegians have colonized in those states, and that’s what this blog part is about.

The Norwegians started coming in the late 1800s and kept on doing so for years to come, and that’s why there are a lot of people in Wisconsin that are Norwegian There is so much Norwegian heritage in these parts, they even have an American version of the Birkebeiner.

The Birkebeiner is a story in Norwegian history, about how a group of Norse people who safely transported baby Haakon Haakonsson, the heir of the throne, to a safe place while being chased by the present-at-the-time king, Eystein Meyla who actually was an imposter, and that’s why he wanted to kill the baby Haakon Haakonsson.

Fun Fact: People who live in Wisconsin wear cheese shaped hats to football games, because they were called that because it is a german insult (to have holes in your head) but the wisconsinites adopted the name and the insult backfired

Marks Desserts

It is summer vacation, and everybody needs desserts! Here are some of my favorites that I made this summer. Some of them are store bought so I didn’t have the recipe 😦 .

1. Brownies!
2. Cookies!
3. Cinnamon swirl cake
4. Rice Krispies Treats!
5. Blueberry Muffins!

I have asked people around the cabin what their favorite dessert was, and those are the stats I got from them.

Brownies were people favorite because warm chocolate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream is great for a summer night. I put the mix in an 8X8 pan and cook for 45 minutes at 325.

For cookies, I use the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag but add a bit more flour and vanilla then called for. They make delicious cookies! I also helped make chocolate espresso cookies. The chocolate chips had coffee in them. People also made Oatmeal Butterscotch cookies, which were so good!  They are called oatmeal scotchies if you want the recipe. You can find all of the Nestle Toll House recipes online.

Cinnamon swirl cake is fancier than the other ones on the list. You make the batter, pour half of it in the pan, then sprinkle cinnamon on top. Then add the rest of the batter and cinnamon on top again.  It’s sort of like a 2-layer cake.

Rice Krispies Treats are an old classic. Melt 40 marshmallows on a pan with 3 tablespoons of butter, add a bit of vanilla, then add 6 cup of Rice Krispies. Put them in a cake pan and let them cool. Yummy!

I knew the muffins would be good as I tasted the batter. You mix everything together add the blueberries and put them I the oven. After 30 min, voila!! Little muffins that are great with vanilla ice cream, or by itself as a snack.

Origin of cabin

In the early fifties, My great grandpa and his family bought a little cabin in northern wisconsin. It only had a little kitchen and a living room. This was the Cabin. Over 60 years, they built the  master bedroom, the kid bedroom, the bathrooms, the second master bedroom, the boathouse and then the porches! It is amazing that there are still bunches of things to do!

Boats and paddle board

One of, if not the best thing you can do at the cabin is take out the canoes and paddle boards! Once when my grandpa and I were in a canoe, we were drifting close to the shore to see ducks, when suddenly I spotted a deer, sleeping right in front of us! Canoes can get up nice and close to animals, and with paddle boards, you can race and go into the areas canoes can’t. It is also a good way to get away from noise.

That being said, we do have more than those types of boats. We have a sailboat called ‘Windigo’ and a mini sailboat called a snark. The snark is more of a one person boat, but is still pretty fun and fast. I am not especially good at it.  We also have kayaks, and those are really fast, but you get wet when your paddling! My dad is very good at kayaking.                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Canoe trip As I have previously mentioned, our cabin is built along the edge of Lake Namakagon which flows into a river that goes down into the Mississippi and down to the Gulf of Mexico. well that’s exactly what we did. We drove the canoes down to the dam, and started   paddling. We had researched that this section was very shallow, but we still had a great experience going down the rapids and steering away from the rocks. Sometimes, I had to get out of the boat and drag us past the rocks in the extremely fast waters, and every time we got stuck everyone was very stressed.  Imagine the screeching of an aluminum boat, going against the rock while I was dragging the boat over a rock! Once I was tugging the boat and it very sharply into my knee, and tumbled into the water and was soaked. I was sitting in front, called the bowman, and I had to tell the steerer (my dad) were i thought there was no rocks, but we always scrape the boat at least a little bit. You can imagine the bottom of the boat afterward! 

Running the road

During the summer break, my dad and I would go out running on the road every morning, and it was very annoying having to get out of bed and then run in a forest full of rocks and mud puddles, and you definitely did not want to stop, or else you would get eaten alive by the mosquitoes and horseflies. We would be so hot after, that we would jump straight into the freezing cold lake! The second you touched the water, you would get the wind knocked out of you because it was as cold as jumping into snow in your shorts, but it was always refreshing. 

Thanks for reading. Make sure to tune in for the next blog post!

The international Moose!