Ran aground!
No more North Sea and beaches. Minnesota prides itself on all the lakes but they are not quite the same. Katie and I grew up with the saltwater of the North Sea so for us it was a normal thing and we could even drink it with out getting an immediate case of the runs. Incidentally, the sheep on the dikes along the North Sea are the only sheep that can stomach the salt water. If you start young enough I guess your body just adapts. Now that we were living in Minnesota it was tim to start exploring Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes.
Mom took us to Lake Calhoun one day for a walk. This is some trendy area in the city with several lakes. Lots of people running, walking and biking, good thing we had gotten the walking on a leash thing under control! We stopped at the first spot that had access to the water and I went in for a dip. My first fresh water swimming experience. I kind of liked it actually and the water was much warmer than the North Sea. Katie just did some wading as usual and she likes to drink the water so she did that while I did some swimming and stick retrieval. We could actually walk around the entire body of water in about an hour. We stopped at one spot to check out the sailboats and canoes. Mom did not trust herself to take the two of us out with her in the canoe. She felt that we would all end up in the water so we just took a test ride on the beach.
All in all it was an interesting experience. We ended up going to this lake about once a week and we found a few other lakes that were good for walking and swimming. The thing with these lakes and ponds is that at the end of the summer many of them get covered in Algea and other gunk so we can’t go in without risking getting all dirty and/or sick, so our choices were a bit limited but lakes are fun. Katie and I still miss the wide open beaches of the North Sea where we could run free for miles and the sea had it’s waves that were fun to dive into but the lakes will do just fine.
