We awoke at six, to a beautiful sunny sky. We packed up our last few things and went up to the tracks, just in case the train was early. We had the trusty old Svea up there and put a pot on to boil. We decided to just have coffee because the train would be here in an hour or so.

A cold fog bank rolled in while we sipped our coffee and waited…and waited….and waited….. I like the Nick Adams feel of catching the train out in the woods, but sitting around waiting in a cold fog just ain’t fun.

But we were in good spirits and were not going to let a little fog dampen them.

At around 9:30 the woman who lives in the next cabin came up with her pack and we asked how did she know the train was going to be late. Does she have a radio in her cabin that allows her to speak with the train crew?? She looked at us weirdly and said the train’s not late… it’s only 8:30. What?? “Oh,” she said, “When you landed yesterday you entered the Central time zone.” You could have knocked us over with a feather! Who’d a thunk it? Well, no wonder we were waiting so long! Anyway, the train finally did arrive at little after 10:15 CDT [any time references from here on are in CENTRAL TIME!!!]

We got all our gear up and into the baggage car…

then we were directed to the bubble car and off we went to Armstrong.

Rebecca was waiting at the station and we lashed down the canoes and drove back to Wildwaters.

A quick hot shower and off we went. We passed dl just as we exited the drive onto the road. Sweeps punched it and we thought dl would be long behind us, what with a canoe strapped on and all. But he hauled his a** and caught up to us. We were driving like a couple old moonshiners flying down a country road! We made it to Thunder Bay in about 2.5 hours and waved so long to Dave as we pulled into a burger joint. When we got to the border, we answered all the questions of the border guard. He was about 28 or 30, and asked us about how was the fishing, did you catch anything? Do you have any fish in the car? We told him the whole story about catching the trout and the walleye and how they got away. He looked at us for a second, and then said, “I gotta look in the back. Open her up!” Clearly, he did not believe that cock and bull story, and thought we were trying to sneak some fish back into the U.S. I mean, how could you possibly NOT catch fish in Wabakimi? He opened the back, took a sniff, closed it, came back to driver window, looked in and said, “Soooo, I guess you guys really aren’t fisherman, eh?” We lost it. We were laughing so hard we nearly busted an artery. “So, welcome home, then,” he says and sends us on our way. As we were driving toward Grand Marais, who do we see right in front of us? Dave! So we raced each other south all the way to Duluth, where we peeled off to go west down to Mille Lac and Dave went east toward home.