The girls and I had to make a run into town for them to pick up and sign their tax paperwork (no unhappy surprises for them, thank God!).  It was a gorgeous day, so when we took advantage of being in town to play some Pokemon Go, we also took advantage of a Pokemon Go gym being right at the beach.

It’s 21C in town, and the cool breezes off the lake made it perfect for enjoying the sun and sand!  There were quite a few people enjoying it.  Come summer time, when the tourist season kicks in, this beach gets quite crowded, so I much prefer to visit it now!

My younger daughter decided to go right into the water – as did others we saw on the beach.  The ambient temperature might have been nice, but the lake water is still ice cold!

You can just barely see it in the above picture, but there is actually still ice on the lake, way off in the distance – the tiniest patch visible near the top left of the photo.  To the right of centre, you can see someone in a power boat.

One of the places we regularly stop to play Pokemon Go is the parking lot for a park, the yacht club, and marina.  Today, there was a whole forest of masts on the hillside of the park, as people were bringing over tiny sailboats to prepare them.  We could see more being brought over as we played the game, easily carried by only two people. The parking lot itself was quite full of people tending to their boats, both for commercial fishing and for casual use.

The population of this town basically doubles in the summer, with all the people who come out to their cottages, some for a couple of months, others just for the weekends from the city.

When it’s quiet like this, I like to keep on the lookout for interesting rocks, such as “fairy stones” (rocks with holes in them, typically bored by local bivalves, the shells of which also dot the beach) and sometimes small fossils that get driven onto the beach by the tides as the ice melts.  Yes, this lake is large enough to have a tide.

This is one of the things about the move back that I am looking forward to enjoying!

The Re-Farmer