Lost Journal

This weekend we are camping in the Land Between the Lakes for Maxwell's birthday so he can pursue his obsession with fishing. It is late July. We did this before in 2000 on our way to Yellowstone from Atlanta and at the time swore we'd never do it again. Well, here we are in a hot, sweaty tent again. The same tent actually. REI makes good tents.

Maxwell's early morning fishing off the dock here by the campsite (Hillman's Ferry) was not a success, so we headed out to scout out other locations. Maxwell has watched a lot of YouTube videos about fishing. He has fished many places. He found a pond he liked the look of by the visitor's center so we headed back for supplies to catch catfish, which he saw in the water.

Confession: I find fishing to be mostly a boring affair. Probably because I haven't studied it enough to be any good at it. So I resolved to take Zinny on the 11 mile Canal Loop hiking trail. Cara dropped us off there before taking the kids down to the catfish pond. Zinny & I had a great time in the woods enjoying nature, running down hills, and she taking dips in Kentucky Lake when the trail got close to the shore. It's in the 80's and quite humid, so we were doing are best to stay hydrated - her with lakewater and I with my camelback. I had some snacks in the pounch rigged my journal on the outside.

Somewhere along the way my journal fell out. I discovered this only when I stopped about 3.5 miles in after about an hour of hiking. So instead of hiking on to the canal Zinny and I headed back the way we came, carefully looking for the journal which eventually we did find about 2 miles back. At this point we decided to just hike over to Barkley Lake so Zinny could swim in both. Our 11 mile plan got shortened to 9, but it was still plenty to wear out Zinny.

It's actually kind of amazing that I've been journalling for over two decades and I still have lost one. Permanently, that is. This is my 11th one. The first one I started to record my efforts to trisect an angle and it sort of grew from there.