Lime Island – 2013

In August 2013, my dad took his favorite daughter and most of the grandkids (Shane, Lauren, Mallory, Liam & Carson) up north to Lime Island to go “camping”. My sister offered to let us take Cameron too but we were all set.

Lime Island is located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the St. Mary’s River and you can only reach it by boat. It took us like eight trips to get all of our crap across – no thanks to my engineer dad’s inability to do anything “rustic”.

We were camping in cabins without electricity and plumbing so my dad brought a couple power supplies and a lamp. He needed to be able to read before bed and power his c-pap machine. I brought about 14 containers of jumbo-sized Wet Ones to compensate for the lack of running water. Lucky for us there is a caretaker on the island and he had a gator with a flatbed on the back so we could load that up with our stuff so it only took us 4 trips up the hill.

The coolest thing about the island was watching the huge freighters go by the island. They were so quiet and seeing them churn through the water in the early morning sun was really cool. The boys played baseball and the girls spent a lot of time on the playground of the school [the island used to be used year-round by the families who worked on the island]. My dad, Michael (my brother-in-law) and I made bonfires and drank beer. We went for boat rides [the kids actually jumped in the freezing cold water!] and the boys did some fishing.

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And me? Since we were going to be on an island with no electricity (or so we thought), no plumbing, and I wasn’t sure how well or even if my cell phone would get service, I felt that I needed to have something to do for the three full days. So I started crocheting. My dad & Michael made tons of fun of me but it was so great to have something to do while passing the time in nature.

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My favorite parts of the trip were when we were sitting around the picnic table and campfire, listening to the Tigers game on my dad’s little radio. It took me back 35 years to being at the river up north at my grandparent’s house, my dad & grandpa throwing horseshoes, my sister & I running around in the yard while the Tigers game was on my grandpa’s little radio. We never went swimming in the river after the Tigers games started because leaches.

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Michael, being a chef, cooked all of the food. My dad, being the boat captain, took us for boat rides to replenish beer and other needed supplies. Me, being a mom, tried to keep everyone safe and relatively clean.

We also had fun jumping off the huge wall of the docking pier thing. The kids (minus Carson) all did it with grandpa:

And then Carson did it later with Liam. It took lots of cheering and stopping and starting but he finally did it. It was awesome:

When I called Rick after I jumped off the wall, I told him it was like 30′ high. He didn’t believe me. Then when I told my dad about how Rick didn’t believe me that it was 30′ high, my dad pointed out that it was really like only 8′.

Funny story from the weekend – my dad needed some new fishing lures so we loaded up the four little kids (leaving Shane back with his dad) and headed across the river to the car. We got there and realized neither of us brought our wallets but both my dad & I had our credit card numbers memorized and my dad had $10 hidden in his van. That’s when my dad noticed the restaurant/bar right at the boat launch and suggested we pick up pizza for lunch. But first he had to make sure they’d take his credit card number from memory [they would] and that it would be ok for four little kids to come in only in their bathing suits – no shirts or shoes [it was]. So we headed off to find the party store to get fishing lures and my dad talked them into taking his credit card from memory too so we could get beer & chips. Then it was back to the restaurant for beer and pizza and then back across the river to the cabin. My dad noticed that there were cabins on the mainland side of the river and that maybe those would be less rustic, but I told him that if we had more power and easier access to a car, he’d have driven to Sault Ste Marie to buy portable DVD players for the kids the first second they said they were bored.

It was really fun to see how they just ran and played and swam. If Rick had been there we would have trekked to the other side of the island and probably camped in a real tent but we were warned of poison ivy on the island and I wasn’t willing to take four little kids on a hike by myself. They said that as long as you stayed on the trails it was ok, but four little kids fighting to be first in line on a hiking trail probably won’t end up with them all staying on the trails.

The weather was fabulous the entire weekend – we really did luck out. I was excited to get home and take a real shower but I am looking forward to doing it again in a year or two and taking Rick with us next time.