Winter?

Annual pilgrimage to the plains of ND and MN for the deer hunting opener. I did not have a deer tag this year but Ben and I were planning on going North and West of Valley City to meet the group I usually hunt with for some "cat tail pushing". Unfortunately I got a call Friday afternoon from Curt DuBord saying that the tags were filled, game over, stay home - bummer. I was told before hand that there was a lot of corn still standing so the hunting was predicted to be slow, not the case with my group, they filled 5 tags within two hours of the opener.
With the woods and prairies full of guns our weekend plans were changed and we did not have much on the agenda.
Leith Devier turned 39 this week and her husband Chad threw a surprise birthday party for her in their garage. The group above is a bunch of swim parents. All of the ladies in the group including Kriston are on the Gator board of directors. What started out as a nice low key party turned into great dance party. Leith (birthday girl) and Gay Blazek kicking up their heels, having a fun time.

Sunday afternoon with not much to do, the boys and I decided to head out to Buffalo River State Park. As those of us in the Midwest know, the weather took a change towards winter at the tail end of last week. The Red River Valley missed all of the snow, but the temps dropped like a stone Friday night and nothing has changed. The photo above looks like trouble in the making. Ice that is not fully developed and about 10 inches of water do not mix when you only have ankle high boots. Both Matt and Ben were soaked from the knees down less then 10 minutes after getting out of the pickup.

Tough time getting the fire going - everything was wet. Of course I did not come as prepared as I should have and was scrounging for paper or anything that would burn.

Persistence paid off and we ended up getting a good blaze going. Matt cooking up a camping delicacy - Hormel hot dogs! Yum. Matts pants do not look wet, that is because they are froze solid.

Kriston set us up with the makings for smores. As you can see, Ben likes smores.

Within a couple of hours, we were cold and headed for home. The weekend was slow but for once that was OK. There were two CX races down in Minneapolis that were missed but that's OK, we had fun being low key.