The Trip to Seattle

I set off for Seattle the day before my family with The New Standards, my band. We were booked to play Fergus Falls as part of the Caravan Du Nord effort that the Minnesota Music Coalition launched this year. Fergus Falls is a cute little town on the way to Fargo as you head up Interstate 94. There's an old theater there that's been turned into a sort of multi-purpose arts space for the region. Has the look of an old movie theater, but the stage is very capable of putting on all sorts of shows.


My girls all came up the night of the show and were back at the hotel after the show bouncing off the walls, ready to go. We got them to bed and hit the road for Seattle early the next morning. It was a beautiful driving day and we hauled ass all the way to Butte, MT. That's 889 miles for anyone that cares. We drove fast and probably made it in a bit less than 14 hours. The girls were champs, still riding high on anticipation for the trip that we had already started.

We stayed in the horrifying Howard Johnson in Butte. This place cured us of any desire we had to economize on hotels. There was a pair of girls underwear left in the bathroom from previous guests. The pool had a scary look about it. The girls were happy but I was bummed. We allocated some additional dollars for hotels for the remainder of the trip.

We got a nice jump on the next morning drove to Moses Lake, WA.

Outside of Butte the Rockies started to reveal themselves and we crossed over the mountains oohing and ahhing. The peaks were just starting to get a bit more snow on them. The girls did their best to enjoy the scenery. But I'm not sure that it makes an impact on kids. I'm trying to recall when I first gave a damn about scenery. I don't know if it was before 19 or 20 really. You have to realize that much of what you'll be looking at in life will not be that much to look at. That's when you appreciate a mountain or a lake. The ocean is a unique case that I believe is always beautiful, scary and mysterious.

We made stops to poke around Bozeman, MT and stopped to gawk at The Columbia river gorge. The gorge offers a stunning look back through time, revealing the volcanism that continues to shape the region as a force that has had an eons long history. Really beautiful. The whole area around the gorge is very arid. But apparently before the Cascades rose up, the mists and cool that make Seattle and Vancouver so pleasant stretched all the way up the gorge, and the area which is now devoid of any trees, was a rainforest.

Driving so hard the first two days made our third day a relative cake walk. We rolled up to our friends house about 1:30 in the afternoon. We were safe and mostly sound.

October 30: Looking Under The Hood

I'm back home a week now from the excursion my family and I took from Minneapolis to Seattle (Gig Harbor, to be exact) where we picked up the Old Town OTCA 16 footer I purchased via Ebay (sort of). The trip was good nutty fun and probably completely uncalled for if all I needed to do was get an old canoe to work on. But I suppose cutting out on a wild ramble just felt like the thing to do, and the canoe almost became an accessory to the nonsense, rather than the purpose for the trip at some point.




But now we're back and the canoe has become the focus of my attention again. I ran it over to my buddy, Bob Hengelfeldt's, shop. Bob rebuilt an Old Town Guide model canoe when he was in high school and now rebuilds old houses. He is my trusted resource for how to go about fixing up my canoe. His impressions matched my own, for the most part... good solid canoe with only the one major structural issue, a cracked rib with some cracked planking to go with it near the prow (or is it stern?).



Bob advised me to get some linseed oil on the canoe to stabilize the wood. I decided to get off the lst bits of canvas that were hanging on, remove the gunwales and keel and follow his advice.

As I started unscrewing the gunwales I started to become concerned because of the way the wood was reacting on one of the gunwales. It didn't seem to be hold the screws in the way I might have expected. And sure enough, when I got it all off, I discovered that the gunwale was rotten at the center, probably where it had rested on the ground. There seemed to be a bit of rot up near one of the stems too. It wasn't bad, but likely to be a hassle. My dreams of simply giving the canoe a quick once over and recanvassing it are quickly disappearing.





Now that I have both gunwales off as well as the keel, it looks like the rot is pretty much confined to the gunwale, the bow stem and a bit on the bow deck. I don't think that this is going to be more than I can handle. Fingers crossed and touch wood!



More when I take next steps...