It's now Wednesday morning and we're trying to recover from a horrendous day of travel courtesy of United Airlines. I'll try to make this brief, but the only thing I could think of all day yesterday was that if the CIA wants to get information from terrorists, they should just book them on a trip with United. They'll tell them everything they know just to make it end. Waterboarding is humane compared to what we went through. As Dan said, United's motto should be, "Bend over and leave the driving to us." Our itinerary was to fly from O'Hare to Vancouver non-stop, departing O'Hare at 8:15 AM and arriving in Vancouver at 10:30 AM. We would be starting our cruise Wednesday at 3:00 PM and that would give us the better part of a day to ... read more

The snow storm started last night and when we woke up it was a real blizzard. Overnight we received about 10" of snow and it was still coming down hard. The snow was piling up while we waited for it to subside a bit before going riding. Jan decided to stay at the lodge since she knew she wouldn't enjoy breaking trail in over a foot of new snow. As it turned out, we received about 16" of snow by the time it ended. Some other parts of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula got up to 20" from this storm. Pat, Dawn and I headed south toward Conover, WI. It was still snowing pretty hard when we got on the trail. There were a couple tracks from previous sleds, but not much. Pat was leading ... read more

I finally convinced Jan to go with me on a snowmobile trip for the first time this winter. She's been working a lot at her job as a substitute teacher, so the schedules weren't meshing to do it before this week. Of course my schedule is open to doing it any time. I've made quite a few trips this winter even though it's been an unusually low snow winter. We arrived Sunday around 3:00 PM at the Gateway Lodge in Land O' Lakes, WI right on the border of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. After unpacking and unloading the snowmobiles, we went to dinner at the Red Man Supper Club. We've been coming up here for over 20 years. We used to bring the whole family up when the kids were younger and have many great ... read more

(Photos courtesy of Michael Weinstein and John Carson: Many thanks) I sure wish I had been able to keep up better with this blog during the trip. It's so much easier to remember things that happened within a day or two rather than a week later. But our days were so long and I was so exhausted by the end of the day that I couldn't get to it. I would need all the sleep I could get before tackling another day on the trail. During dinner the night before, we all talked about getting an earlier start riding since we had somewhere near 200 miles to get back to Riviere du Loup from Matane. For a change, we had no mechanical issues to deal with and the trails should be well groomed. We started out ... read more

(Contributing Photographer-Michael Weinstein: Many thanks) When we were stuck out in the field yesterday, we had another problem I didn't mention. Gary's sled wouldn't start. It has electric start and wouldn't do anything. Skidoo had a better idea and when you buy a new sled from them with electric start, they don't give you a pull starter like every other snowmobile on the planet. We tried to jump start it from John's battery and nothing happened. Gary then had to pull out the emergency rope and finally got it started by pulling it on the clutch. When we got back to the hotel and parked in front, I tried to start mine and had the exact same problem. What else could happen???? The next morning Gary called the Skidoo dealer and they sent a couple guys ... read more