Madeline Island Camping Trip

I mentioned last week that I was on my way up to Madeline Island for some hardcore camping!  As hardcore as I get anyhow.  For those who don't know or didn't look it up, Madeline Island is one of the 21 Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, off the Northern shore of Wisconsin.

Steve and I left on Wednesday night right after work and made our way up to Duluth, MN; only stopping to buy groceries and eat Arby's (YUM!).  Once in Duluth, we stayed with Blake and Steph (long time friends of Steve) for the night.  They would also be joining us at camp on Thursday.  Thing about Madeline Island is you've gotta take a ferry to get there.. and the campground that we choose to camp at are first come, first serve.  Needless to say, we wanted to get on an early ferry.
So Duluth is 2 hours from us; we arrive round about 9:15p (after dealing with some completely gangster road construction).  We chat for a bit and drink a beer.  The plan is to wakey-wakey around 4am, so we go to bed... at like 10:30-11:00pm.  Nice.  A planned 5 hours of sleep in a strange house on a strange couch... what could be better?!  In all honestly though, I was just happy to have a free place to crash for the night, so no complaints here.

Thursday morning, 4am rolls around and about about ready to get up and concur the world!  NOT.
I mope my way over to the alarm and hit snooze... just once I figure will be plenty.  I was scared of not hearing the alarm go off again, so I laid there awake until the 10 minutes was up.  We wake, make our mouths so fresh and so clean clean and hit the road.  We hit a (gangster) detour, which wasn't as bad as we thought and make our way into the (ridiculous) state of Wisconsin {note: I don't hate the people in WI of whose blogs I read; I simply hate the football team and pretty much anyone who claims to be a fan, the police men and women who've fucked me time and time again regardless of fault, and the entire state just because it's what I've known my whole life}.  The drive is so crappy as it's 4:30 in the morning and I've have no coffee.

We make a stop in Washburn, WI to pee, fill up, and grab a quick bite to eat on the go.  Our goal is to make the 6:30 ferry across... but we got side tracked at the gas station and barely miss the ferry.  We were pretty okay with it as an hour really isn't going to make or break our camping situation.

We finally make it to the island and have to stop for coffee at that point; Steve and I can be pretty picky when it comes to coffee, so we stop at Mission Hill Coffee House (if you go to the island, you MUST stop).  We then head out to the Town Park to snag our campsite.  We loop once and find the spot we want, the people are leaving to day and as luck would have it, they are in the process of packing their junk as we scope.  So we get out and ask if we can take a look-see around the site, they give the go ahead and we snag the site.  The best part is they are on the way out, so we don't have to wait until the noon check out to start unloading our stuff!  WOO-HOO!  While we wait, we take a walk down to the water to see how the beach has changed.

We go back to camp and they are G-O-N-E, gone!  However there are 2 little bitches trying to steal the metal ring with attached grate for our fire!  WTF?!  Do you not see our car parked at the site entrance and see the tag on the pole stating this campsite is OURS?!  The bitch in me wanted to make an appearance, but as the girlfriend of a calm, relaxed, 'lets not start drama' guy, I kept her in and simply asked "Are you taking that?"  They're reply "Oh!  Is this your campsite?"  "Yep."  "Okay, sorry, we didn't think anyone was here"  (see bold mental rant a few lines back).  Steve's goal was to then take said metal ring, get it into the ground and make our fire pit easy for the weekend (the people before us moved it around and it was quite stupid).  He did manly things while I unloaded necessities from the car to get our tent set up and ready for sleeping.  We then set up the tent, air mattress, sleeping bags and pillows.

Our Campsite:

I won't bore you with the details of relaxing, because as joyous as relaxing is... is pretty boring to read about. For the most part, we sat around fires, ate a lot of food, drove around the island, walked around town, hung out at the beach and swam in the warmest water I've ever felt at Lake Superior!
I will share some photos with you though and do a little explaining where it's necessary.

The group of us at the beach: (L-R) Steph, Blake, Steve, myself, Jeff, Linnea

 Our tent all lit up

 One of the many fires

 Da beach

A little road we found... we walked a ways down, but found nothing but skeeters 

 Not sure what this is... but it was cool to shoot

 We met a deer

 South Shore

 Trying to take pictures of the moon one night

 light sticks on the beach, this was Jeff and Steve having a sword fight

 body outlines

 ET with a red stream of pee?

 Linnea is good at writing backwards :)

We decided to drive through Wisconsin on the way home, rather than taking the path back to Duluth and dealing with the boring road home from there.  I am so glad we did too!  It sure gave me a bit of new appreciation for the state and may I just say (Krysten)... Hayward is such a awesome little town!  Hayward was our first stop on the drive and we stopped at a few antique store there (where I found and purchased The Wizard of Oz on vinyl!!).  On the drive home there were many small towns in which we found all the antique stores and stopped at them (something we greatly enjoy doing together).  A 4 hour drive ended up taking us just over 6 hours to complete, not too shabby for us (we get side tracked and have been known to putz).

We did make it home though and had a great time while we were away.

Steve and I at the beach: