Kayaking with Friends on Sugar Creek

Hi everyone....  Roger here....  It has been a while since our last blog.

Sorry for the delay.  We have been busy in Pendleton selling furniture from our house and now our daughter's house - that we own.  She will not be needing it with her recent move to Ft. Myers, Florida, so we are clearing everything out and doing a spring cleaning at the same time.

  We are currently parked in her driveway and had a 50 amp outlet installed so that we can run our air conditioners.  I must say that with all the work we are doing, it is far more convenient to be parked in the town where the work is, rather than several miles away in a state park.  

We really enjoyed our last days at Turkey Run State Park.  The stay, which had been planned last January, involved having friends (Chuck/Cindy, Audrey/Pat, Ed/Karen) in the adjacent sites for the weekend.  The festivities began Friday afternoon with a goodly supply of Chuck's "breakfast juice" (a/k/a Bloody Marys).

We ate extremely well every meal - barbecued chicken (Cindy brought at least 15 birds!), barbecued ribs, homemade pasta salad, pork burgers from Prophetstown State Park, and outstanding breakfasts that included french toast casserole & sausage, sausage and gravy (the best I've ever had) with potatoes, and yogurt cups with fresh fruit & nuts (Audrey gets an A+ for presentation).

The occasion reunited Chuck and Cindy's dog, Sophie, with Auntie Dianne.  Dianne, of course, loves Sophie and even washed and saved the dog toy that she played with in Florida.   

Sophie (the brindle dog in the photo) is a designer dog, half dachsund and half boston terrier.   (Dianne here:  if you want to see some cute puppy photos of Sophie, check our prior blog(s) under the category "dachston puppy" in the left-hand listing).

 The last time we saw Sophie was at Ft. Myers in March when she was a puppy (Sophie - not Dianne who is my age).  We were amazed at how big she has gotten.  She weighs almost as much as our dogs, in the 30-pound range, and is strong as an ox - especially on the leash.  She gets along extremely well with our whippets and truly is a sweetie pie.

We have met Chuck and Cindy at Turkey Run during the same time frame for the last four years.  The highlight of each trip (other than the food and breakfast juice) has always been an 11.5 mile kayak trip down Sugar Creek.  This year's trip was outstanding. 

 It was a beautiful, sunny day.  We made a couple of stops as we paddled along - one for a picnic lunch, and one for a surprise cache of

 margaritas that Pat had hidden in his cooler (under the beer).  

 There usually is a mishap of some sort during the trip (Dianne's near spill a few years ago was a memorable one).  This year there were a couple:  Karen's kayak had a hole in the bottom and was taking on water - a lot of water.  After draining the water (half hour process), we did a band aide job of covering the hole, literally, with a band aide that I had in my waterproof box.  It seemed to work, at least well enough to finish the trip.  Chuck DID dump his kayak.  Unfortunately, a good pair of his prescription sunglasses are now floating somewhere along Sugar Creek.  

We said goodbye to Ed and Karen quickly after the kayak trip ended on Saturday so that they could rush home to attend Symphony on the Prairie at Conner Prairie in Fishers, IN.  We enjoyed everyone else's company for the rest of the weekend.

We have some good news (knock on wood).  We accepted an offer on our house!  We know that nothing is final until the closing, but we are ecstatic about possibly putting a major hurdle behind us.  

We will not be doing anything too exciting until Labor Day weekend and another kayak trip with the Gemmers, so the blogs may be infrequent and probably not too interesting for a while. Keep with us, though, because we will have a lot of good things to report as we continue to enjoy our new lives.