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Vacation Highlight: Eating Trout
Here’s a little highlight from our trip: Toby caught a fish, a trout. Actually he caught a lot of fish—maybe twenty a day. But on the first day he caught a fish, we took it home and he cooked it. He fried it up in about a pound of butter and some sliced apples that he picked off a tree that was growing by the cabin. He said he wanted to eat a meal that came from the lake. More power to him.
Personally, I do not like fish. But to be a good sport I tried a bite. I figured it couldn’t be that bad since it was fried in all that butter. Surely the butter would at least taste good.
It did not. It tasted like swamp. I suppose it didn’t help that I had seen what was inside the fish when he cleaned it. Some seeds, bugs and a shiny Lifesaver wrapper. I don’t know, something about a fish eating trash just doesn’t do it for me. But then it could also be that trout are just fishy fish and I do not like the taste of fish. Anyway, at least I tried it.
After Toby ate the fish he admitted that it wasn’t all that good. Hmph, I thought. He could have told me that before I tried a bite. Oh well. That’s what camping is all about I guess. At least if I ever get stranded out in nature some day and I’m forced to fish to stay alive, I’ll know that horrible taste is totally normal and I won’t die from it.
It was such a pretty fish. Too bad he had to die, though I suppose he was going to to die anyway from that Lifesaver wrapper. I’m sure that wouldn’t digest very well. Good thing we let all those other fish go. I do have some really great under-water movies of catching fish. I’ll try to put a short one up one of these days.
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Recap: Vacation Day 4,5,6
and all the rest of those days that sort of ran together
I wrote up until day three of our vacation and then I let go of my self-inflicted work ethic. Without the internet to check in on me, days ran into each other and I left my laptop alone more and more. Being bored was actually kind of fun. Want to instantly be transported back to your youth? Let yourself get bored.
Bug and I probably threw enough rocks into the lake to alter it’s geography. It was completely boring but strangely I didn’t feel agitated to go find something else to do. It was more important to just sit there and record every little nuance of boredom because it might not happen again for a long time.
Time crawled. We got so bored that fishing was the most exciting thing to do. We fished every day. We caught so many fish that even catching them got boring but we kept doing it anyway. It was a perfectly happy and content boredom, something I don’t think I’ve ever felt comfortable with before. But here I was completely comfortable. The slower the day went by, the better. I’ve never had a vacation that didn’t fly by before. It was strange but wonderful.
There is nothing like the sound of grasshoppers snapping their wings in the air as they fly from one sitting place to the next. Flies buzzing off in the distance not giving you the time of day because they have other things to do. The still air, the sun soaking into your shirt, warming your back. Soft ripples of water lapping against the side of the canoe, gently pushing you this way and that… quietly, softly, like dreaming. This was the perfect way to end the summer.
I still have some more highlights of the trip that I want to write about but I just wanted to post this before I forgot about it.
