Second Day Observations

On our second day at the lake we woke up to find this representative of the local wildlife having breakfast in the back yard.

The quiet little beast would show up again every morning like clockwork for the rest of our visit.




The lake itself turned out to be much calmer than the day before with only the most gentle of waves lapping at the sand. In fact, this was about the calmest we ever saw it.




It was about the middle of the afternoon before we saw our first boats. I was surprised at how vacant the lake appeared the vast majority of the time. Maybe the threat of storms during much of our visit kept most sensible people on the land. Or maybe there just aren't that many people who can afford to go tooling around the lake on a weekday....





This was the first Jet Ski or Waverunner that we saw. They invariably looked terribly small and vulnerable to me given the immensity of the water. I've since seen one up close (in my local grocery store, of all places) and it turns out that they're bigger than I thought. In fact, I don't think our car has a much bigger footprint. All the same, I wouldn't want to be caught out in the open lake with an empty gas tank with either one.

And FYI: They're not exactly cheap. Used models seem to run around $4500 while new ones can set you back $13,000 or more. That strikes me as quite a lot of money to spend just to be able to scoot around the lake for an hour or two on the few good weather days Ohio has during a boating season that lasts maybe half a year. I suppose there might be places that rent them out by the hour but I didn't see any. (Not that I was looking very hard.)





Here are the rocks at the east side of our beach in the process of being buried....





An explicit close-up shot of some what had washed up on the beach since the day before.







A white heron doing its thing.

There seems to have been a heron within sight about half the time - but rarely if ever two. I guess they're just not very social. Too bad. If they hung out in groups of two each could always blame the other for being the one who was scaring the fish away.





By the second day of our visit we'd fallen into a pattern of getting up early, having breakfast, going down to see what may have washed up on the beach overnight, going out to explore the area shops, having lunch at a locally owned restaurant, coming back and watching the lake for a few hours until sunset, then grabbing a sandwich and going to bed. Whenever we came back from our explorations we found this example of local folk art waiting patiently for us in the main room. We named him Winslow. I suppose he'd been born with the help of a chainsaw but he never shared the details of his birth, so I really don't know. We saw numerous other, much smaller examples of Winslow in the shops we visited. I suppose many people would consider him to be a fine example of kitsch calculated to separate tourists from their dollars, but that's ok with me. I've always liked tourist kitsch. I find the sheer tawdry uselessness of it quite appealing. Maybe because whenever I buy something that's allegedly of high quality and/or useful, it almost always breaks or otherwise disappoints. Kitsch doesn't try to be anything but useless crap from the start. And as far as I know, no manufacturer has ever had to recall a little cedar box or a rubber tomahawk because of a sudden and deadly acceleration or an exploding gas tank. Maybe someday I'll come across a sports car or a diamond ring or a fur coat that makes me smile half as much as good ol' Winslow did, but I honestly doubt it.