How much further?

Another morning with an awesome breakfast for my boat buddy and me. We had oddly shaped pancakes (the "skillet" wasn't exactly flat on the bottom) with bacon. We have become quite efficient and in sync in the mornings. One is cooking the other packing up the tent or filtering water for dishes.

Our failed portage yesterday left a nice part of Voyaguers unseen so we paddled back that direction to check out the pictographs on some tall stone walls either on the lake shore or on the islands. We saw some cool rock formations but no real pictographs. My boating buddy is an experienced rock climber and showed off her skills attempting to scale the wall. She can now say she climbed a wall in Canada! This excursion added about 5 miles to our already big day. We took a few breaks and had lunch on a sandbar where we had time to go swimming a cool off. I had tuna with mayo, crackers, trail mix, and lemon cookies. One of the guys caught a nice bass but while everyone was taking pictures managed to drop it back in the lake and away it went. Boo. No fish for dinner. A long track after lunch ran us up to 15 miles for the day. To pass the time Maggie and I played games, that I mostly hated, like 20 questions. We gave book synopsis's and told stories from our lives. That distracted us from the fatigue and pain in our arms, shoulders, legs, and butts. Maggie tell me a story! We paddled into camp around 5 PM exhausted! This camp is closer to civilization and had some pretty sweet amenities, mainly a bathroom with toilet paper, walls, door, and roof. No sink, no flushing. We were also able to pack away our water filtration devices and use a well pump to get fresh water. I took a "bath" in the lake and laid on the dock in the sun to dry while the guys tried again to catch fish dinner. They failed. The camp sites were wooded and filled with mosquitos. By dinner time we all broke out the 100% Deet! Dinner tonight was creamy potato soup with bacon bits on top. Yum. Fast and easy. Once we were all cleaned up and prepped for the morning we sat around and played Rummy. Farah won after 6 or so extremely competitive hands. The mosquitos were so unbearable we all retired to our tents. Again, I slept but tossed and turned during the night. I'm not sure I'll ever get used to sleeping on a thin sleeping pad with a blow up pillow and sleeping bag. Another good day in the back country.