Day 24–Memories

Somewhere, one of my relatives has a picture of me with the big fish, so had to get one of Aryn too.  Trystan will be subjected to it when I bring him here.

We spent the morning visiting my grandmother, then had lunch in town and headed up to the lake cabin. 

Memories are funny things.  The GPS didn’t recognize the cabin’s address, so I had to try and figure out how to get there from memory – keeping in mind that I’d only ever driven there one time as an adult, that in the early 90s.  Other than that, I’d traveled the route as a kid curled up in the backseat of an Oldsmobile, trying to pass the time of the six-hour drive to get there – turns out it’s only about an hour, but it seemed longer as a kid waiting to get to the lake.

But from the highway in Erskine, I made not a single wrong turn on the way there. 

We spent the afternoon visiting with my cousins there and took a spin around the lake in their boat.

Then I decided to try to find the older cabin, the one I’ve never driven to and only have the child’s memories of riding in the car to go by.  We headed down the road to the general area and I used Google Maps to get a general idea of which road might lead toward the part of the lake I thought might have the cabin on it.

As soon as I made the turn, I knew it was right and put the map away.  The way it curved instead of being straight, the place to turn, and then the still gravel road that led to the cabins were eerily familiar.  Found that one with no wrong turns either.

There was a car at the cabin, but no one answered, so I snuck Aryn around to the lakeside for a quick peek and she was able to see the sheer, boulder-strewn cliff my grandfather set up a rope for us kids to swing out over. 

And the lake where my dad once yelled, “Grab that raft and follow me,” to swim across, taking the raft for the return trip so I could swim back.  Google Earth now tells me that’s about 1/2 a mile across.

Then we stopped at my aunt’s house, where my grandparents used to live when I was young, and looked around.  Apparently barns shrink over time, because I remember the barn there as being more like forty-feet tall and a hundred-feet square … but I was young and impressionable.