Wednesday night, almost the entire staff, including Tim and Kathy who arranged it, got to take a boat tour of the bluffs with Shoreline Tours.  This came about because someone from the tour company took the Certified Tourism Ambassador (CTA) training with us a few weeks ago and they offered us a free tour.  I took well over two hundred pictures and it has taken me a few days to edit them all.  Now, picking just a few of these to show you is my next hurdle!

We began assembling at the wharf in Gills Rock.

Joe and Kari Velez

From L-R: Bill Curran (Rosanne’s husband), Bob and Katherine Plahmer, and Kathy and Tim Guckenberg

From L-R: Chris and Deb Hoover, and Rosanne Curran

Bill and Barb Zimmerman (the folks who clean the bathrooms on our weekends)

We passed over a shipwreck called the Fleet Wing.  This is the mast.

This is an instrument on the boat where the black stripe down the middle of the picture is the path of the boat and the goldish-brown is a view of the lake bottom for 250 feet on either side!

These are some Indian hieroglyphs. The tour guide said they show several canoes (lower right) with one turned over, and I think he said there is a faint impression of a war bird (on the left?). This is all on a rock overhanging the water of Green Bay. How did they do that? Standing in a canoe?

Tim pointed out these chairs on the side of a cliff where he says he has sometimes seen people sitting…

…and if you can see the little black dots on the cliff wall, this gives you an idea how crazy the “sitters” are!

We watched a bald eagle being chased away from a fish by a bunch of seagulls!

Mark on Dramamine!

They broke open a cooler of beer and wine, crackers, cheese and venison sausage (made by Tim and Kathy) and everyone started partying!

Under this house you can see a circle of glass floor.

All you can see of this mansion is the chimneys peaking through the treetops (the caretaker’s cottage is near the shore). The captain had photos of the mansion from a magazine article. It’s got forty-eight rooms and it cost over $19 million to build. They just sold it for a little over $2 million. Can you imagine being able to take that kind of loss?

The sun beginning to set

Bill C, Mark and Chris. Mark is looking very mellow!

Different ways of enjoying the view

Spectacular sunset

An early moon

Joe enjoying one last look

So today is Sunday.  For the last several weeks I’ve been holding a Bible study here on Sunday mornings.  The first Sunday it was just Mark and me.  Last Sunday another staff member joined.  And this morning we had twelve including Mark and me.  I don’t expect it to grow exponentially, but it was nice to have campers join us today.

Then I tried a Moravian church in Sister Bay.  I gather the Moravians also came out of the Reformation.  They do antiphonal reading out of their hymn book, but their creed is a little different than the Apostle’s creed.  It was interesting.  The pastor’s sermon was on Mary washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair.  Jesus told Simon, whom He was visiting, a parable about those for whom much has been forgiven loving the most.  Then the pastor talked about the church’s love for a young woman who just graduated from high school.  He pulled out a ledger where entries are made for every life event celebrated in their church and read the entries on her birth, her baptism, and her confirmation and said there are pages waiting for her marriage, her children, and eventually her death.  What a nice way to honor her!

I came home and spent the afternoon planting roots for flowers that probably won’t show up till next year at this point.  That’s okay.  I’m planning ahead!

Meanwhile, Mark is working on taking out part of the floor in our RV that is rotten.

About a square yard of rotten flooring.

And did I mention the new curtain samples I made to hang up in our front window?

These samples were on sale at Hancock Fabrics, which is going out of business.

Tomorrow, the 13th, is our eight year anniversary.  I’ll let you know how it goes.