July 10

July 10 Day 10, Evening this time

The fridge is out again, so we're drinking up our liquor before we run out of ice! I'm on brandy old fashioneds, Piech on fireball old fashioneds, sitting by the grill behind our camper. So, if I'm less succinct in this particular blog, blame it on the refrigerator. So, the other day on my drive to Maligne Lake at dawn, I came upon a pair of tennis shoes with socks, on the shore by a big rapids of the Malign River. Two possibilities: some dope took a swim near shore before it got surly, and forgot his shoes when he left, or some dope underestimated the current and went a foot too far from shore, and is now miles down river being fed upon by trout, or who knows what. I reported the shoes to the ranger station, complete with a picture of his white, double-wide, size 11 Filas with no ID or car keys in them (I checked.) They're taking it seriously and checking the local indigenous camp for reports of missing persons, and keeping an eye out downstream.  It's the second time on this trip we've run into this. They pulled the body of a thirty one year old male from our campground at  Turtle Creek, back in North Dakota a couple of days before we got there. He had parked at the camp beach and never came back from the water. I didn't write about it in the blog, since I try to be upbeat and brief😏but it's coming back to me now. 

Anyway, on to happier things. Our fridge is f_d up. It's draining the camper battery within minutes of us turning it on. And it's full of warming and thawing food. We got the camper at Jerry's Camping near Stoughton Road in Madison, an 18 foot Sunlight, made by Sunlight Trailers. The folks at Jerry's have been great; very patient and helpful, but it's tough for them to help us figure this out from two thousand miles away and poor cellular and no internet service. But other than that, we've had a nice stay in Jasper. Our grill is charcoal, and we're cooking brats and veggies wrapped in aluminum foil. The reason we're cooking it behind the trailer is because there's a fire ban here, and no fires allowed, including charcoal. (Peach insists the ban includes charcoal because that's what she heard the ranger say. I insist the ban doesn't include charcoal because that what Bonz Says he heard the ranger say!

Heading 350 miles up tomorrow toward Charlie Lake, but not leaving Jasper without memories. We met a nice lady who runs the laundromat who was born in Madison when her father was a grad student in math. In fact, he lost his thesis in the bombing of Sterling Hall! He ended up for a while as a math professor at UW Whitewater (Then called Whitewater College.) He has dementia now and his daughter is anxious to hear stories she can talk to him about from long ago, since that's all he's got. So I told her about the bombing, the student killed, and the four perpetrators. Peach called our pickleball friend in Whitewater (where we play pickleball frequently and play euchre with our good friends there) who also taught math at UW Whitewater in the seventies, and he knew him! We then  had dinner at the Jasper Brew Pub and the Canadian guy sitting next to us installed the gym floors in the sixties at, you guessed it, UW- Whitewater.  Small world. Meanwhile we've biked, hiked, kayaked, and sight- seed in the great Jasper area. Have seen several bears, moose, elk and deer on our travels. Peach calls me obsessive. That's not true. I'm merely overly focused on one thing at a time and talk about it incessantly.

               Peach kayaking on Pyramid Lake

A black bear we saw at dusk on the road to Malign Lake

Writing the blog with my hidden grill and drink