One of these days, I will be able to spend a weekend or more up here at the moominbeach without having to do a bunch of business type stuff or schlep cosmic debris around or whatever. That’s not this weekend. I won’t even begin to try to describe today’s business but there was a bit of in-between time during which we were at loose ends in Sault Ste. Siberia. The Commander’s house is almost completely empty now so there really wasn’t much point in spending a lot of time there. So we headed over to Ashmun Bay, where we encountered this vista:

That’s the John B. Aird in the background, for future reference. We had about an hour and a half to kill and a bit of euphoria to deal with (at least on my part) and I eyeballed the John B. Aird coming down and the Presque Isle waiting to go through the Poe Lock and I said, “Let’s go walk around the locks!” Bingo. That was the ticket!

We watched my new fav-o-rite boat Baby Blue (aka the Ken Boothe Sr) go up via the Poe Lock.

Remember the John B. Aird? Here it is coming downbound into the MacArthur Lock. I am on the observation deck and it looks stormy to the west but all we got was some garden-variety rain. But we needed that. I was ecstatic!

Here’s a closeup of the Aird entering the lock.

I have been going to the locks all my life. I remember when the worst thing you had to endure when entering the locks was the ladies who bombarded you with tourist pamphlets. (Errr, I grew up here, don’t need that…). These days, you have to submit to a cursory search upon entering the locks park, although today, for whatever reason, nobody (security guards or pamphlet ladies) was around when we entered. And then, I was walking around texting my daughter when a cute perky young female security person approached me with, “TEXTING IS NOT ALLOWED HERE!” Meeeee, being a rule-follower [except when I am not], quickly stopped texting and asked (in horror), “Really?”. She laughed and told me that she was just kidding. I laughed too and we parted as friends but I can’t help thinking what kind of a society we Americans have talked ourselves into. My knee-jerk reaction was to think I was doing something wrong. Even though probably 75% of the folks up on the observation deck were taking photooos and texting, emailing, or posting them to facebook or instragram or wherever…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2012 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.