This weekend I had the good fortune to spend time with some friends up north at a small cabin in Rice Lake. It provided me with some much needed time to decompress and clear my head.This cabin had all the seemingly standard amenities of a Minnesota/Wisconsin cabin. They had the jet ski, fishing boat, pontoon, and a few kayaks/canoes. It's been a long while since I've gotten to tool around on a jet ski and I definitely forgot how much I missed riding one. Along with tubing, jet skiing is one of my favorite things to do on a lake. I took the jet ski out for a long spin around the lake and really got to appreciate this small swatch of land just across the Minnesota border in Wisconsin. There were a lot of cabins along this lake but nothing really too pretentious. Which is a fairly rare site these days.
We also had an opportunity to play a very unusual game of volleyball with some random people we met. The lake where we were staying had something the locals called the "sandbar". This small sandbar had a partially submerged volleyball court on it and a place where people parked their boats, drank, and hung out. So in an effort to get the full "Rice Lake" experience, we parked our little boat and started a game of volleyball. This volleyball court was rather unique because the court was in water that came up to just over your knees. Oh and it had a tad bit of a slope as well. So you can imagine how difficult it might be to actually play volleyball in those conditions (but maybe that was all part of the fun). We played about 10 games and even though they all required a lot of high stepping and ridiculously ungraceful acrobatic diving, we all had a good time.
Once darkness fell, the evening became cool and damp. The neighbors had a raging bonfire going by that point so we visited and shared little pieces of our lives with these friendly strangers. At night you could definitely feel that certain edge in the air which comes as the seasons begin to change. Additionally, since I've been living in the city for a few years now, I am always struck by the serene silence of the country at night. I guess I just get used to the white noise of the city and it just seems odd and a little disorienting at first when I don't have those sounds there. However, this feeling quickly passes and I have no problem enjoying the silence. I also love how crystal clear the skies are on a cool crisp night in the middle of the country. The thing I miss the most about living in the city has to be the stars. No matter what may be going on in my life, I always take solace in looking up at the stars and it immediately makes me realize how little my problems are in the grand scheme of things.
To cap off the evening we did some bar hopping to several dive bars around the area. I always love bar hopping and visiting small country bars. A few things struck me as odd while we were making the rounds. No matter how shady a bar may have looked on the outside, almost all of them had large flat screen plasma TV's mounted on every wall. I found this strange because here we were visiting these establishments at prime-time on Saturday night and most of these bars had more animal heads mounted on the wall than actual customers. Additionally, when the bartender told us the price of the beautiful frothy golden beer that she placed in front of me, I had to ask her to repeat herself because I thought surely I must have misheard what she said. The non-happy hour price for a glass of draft beer was $1.25. After downing about a beer and a half we also found out that using the pool table was completely free. So we then proceeded to play pool and drink into the early hours of the morning while listening to some classic rock tunes on the jukebox. My total bill for the evening.... $10.
Even though there are a lot of things to be jaded about these days, I'm glad I can still experience the unfettered simple pleasure of drinking with friends at a small town dive bar in the middle of nowhere in particular.
