What a way to end the day

Ah, this is what working from an RV is all about!  At the end of each workday, I’d take the dog over to the beach for a swim, come home and grill up some dinner, and then go out for a bike ride or a paddle.

Since I don’t tow a car with my RV, my main mode of transportation around town is my Giant Freedom DX electric bike.  I attach a Burley cargo trailer to haul groceries, or to carry my inflatable boat to whatever spot I wish to launch from.

Here’s a pic of the bike and trailer (along with the empty duffle bag that holds my boat):

My inflatable boat is a SeaEagle 330.  They might not look like much, but they are great comfortable and stable boats, and very easy to pump up and get on the water:

So, is all this set up worth it?  Well, you be the judge!

 

Awesome Ashland

Our home for the week in Ashland, WI was Kreher Park, along the banks of Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay.  Ashland used to be a major port due to having the world’s largest concrete Ore dock.  A hundred years ago, big freighter ships pulled alongside this massive structure and awaited a railroad train to arrive on top of the dock to dump it’s cars filled with iron ore into each of those vertical shutes which then poured into the awaiting ship to sail it to points east out of the Great Lakes.  It must have been an amazing site to see.

Today, Ashland is a quiet, mainly working-class town with lots of old buildings.  It doesn’t draw the tourists as much as Bayfield does with it’s B and B’s and more tourist shops, but I rather preferred Ashland’s low key more “home town” kind of feel.

One way the town has spruced up some of their old drab brick buildings in the downtown area is with wonderful painted murals.  There are now 19 of them throughout town, some as long as a full city block and others as small as 30 feet wide or so.

This one is a memorial to Ashland’s armed forces veterans.

Here’s one showing some of Ashland’s buildings circa 1910.

And finally, this fun little mural of some 1950s diner waitresses.  Is it me, or does the one on the left look a bit like Hillary Clinton?!!!

Beating the Heat (and humidity)

Looking at the weather forecast for Chicago in August, it looked non-stop days of 90+ degrees and 90+ percent humidity.   So, I decided to pack up my home office and move it up north for 3 weeks to northern Wisconsin and the Michigan U.P.

Millie and I spent our first week in the Ashland/Washburn/Bayfield area of northern Wisconsin along the southern shores of Lake Superior.

There were a number of city-owned campgrounds in the area, so I thought my chances would be good at snagging a spot with a nice lake view for the week, but arrival time at these “no-reservation” campgrounds is everything.  When I arrived in the early evening after an all-day drive from Chicago, the first two campgrounds I tried were already filled.  

Fortunately, Memorial Park campground in Washburn still had a few spots available.  It was a nice campground in a pine grove on a bluff overlooking Chequamegon Bay and the city of Ashland across the bay.  All sites had electric and were just $22/night.  I also had good cell coverage as well.  Only downside was that there would not be any decent satellite TV through those pretty pine trees, and OTA signals only brought in 1 channel.  Additionally, being up on a bluff, Millie was frustrated at the lack of easy lake access for her daily swim.   So, the next morning, we headed off to re-visit the other campgrounds again to see if any spots had opened up.

We first stopped at Washburn’s other city campground, West End, which certainly had both Sat TV capabilities as well as beach access, but alas, had no available sites.  So, we drove around to one of Ashland’s campgrounds on the other side of the bay, Kreher Park.   Score!  Three sites had opened up that morning.   We quickly took a site and set up camp for the week.  Electric/water sites were only $20/night!  While the big grassy site (shown above) might not look like much, it had it all—great view of the lake, great connectivity, Sat TV access, easy access to the water and a nice paved bike trail, and was right in-town and close to shopping.

Here a pic of campground (my View is on the far right), as well as the entrance to the boat ramp.

Goodbye Pen and Paper!

I used to go through dozens of ballpoint pens and paper notebook pads each year for taking notes while working.  If I were at an on-site meeting, I wouldn’t want to drag a laptop into the meeting to type notes and have that “barrier” (and distraction) between me and the other meeting participants.   When taking notes on a phone call, I’ve also found it always too hard to concentrate on typing while I’m also trying to listen to (or participate in) the conversation.   So, unobtrusive, quick and easy handwritten note-taking was the solution I always relied on.

When Windows Tablet PCs first came out, I had thought that would be my answer to kissing my paper notepads goodbye—but the interface was clunky and slow (as it tried to transcribe my writing rather than just accept it “as is”).

So, my next solution was a Scansnap scanner and Evernote—here, I could quickly scan in my handwritten note pages, tag the PDFs and upload them into my “cloud-based” Evernote account for later lookup and reference. That was better, but still not quite ideal.  

Enter Apple iPad, Penultimate, and a capacitive stylus!

When I first got my iPad, I purchased nearly every handwritten note-taking app in the App Store.  Some had tons of bells and whistles (i.e. insert pictures, typed text, voice recordings, web pages), but few could do what I was looking for—a “fast as paper” solution with smooth ink, multi-page multiple notebooks, various levels of undo and eraser support, various pen sizes/colors, an “ignore wrist rests” feature to prevent unwanted pen marks when your wrist touches the screen, and finally, an easy way to export either one page or a whole notebook as PDF files for easy sending to my Evernote account.

One app met all those needs—Penultimate.  It’s now the most popular note-taking app in the app store with good reason—it’s effortless to use! (very elegant looking as well).  With just 1 click, I can start a new notebook and start writing a note.  When I fill up the page with and need a new page, a simple tap starts the next page.  Amazing how cumbersome other app developers designed their apps to accomplish these 2 basic steps—all software developers and product designers could learn a thing or two from the Penultimate team.

While you can write with your finger pretty well on an iPad, a capacitive stylus (one with a soft rubber tip that won’t scratch the iPad’s glass screen) allows you to write faster and with better precision.  I’ve been using a Pogo Sketch stylus, but recently broke the plastic clip on it, so have now just ordered a stylus by Boxwave which I hope will be more durable. 

Summer Family Vacation – Part 3 (Ontario and the U.P.)

It was cloudy for our day in Lake Superior Provinicial Park and threatening rain, but I didn’t care.  My main goal was to get that “peaceful lake paddling” time that I’d been craving for the past few months.  We headed over to Crescent Lake where I took the inflatable canoe out on the water, while my brother and Millie hiked a trail that connected the 3 different nearby lakes to Crescent (of course, he had to let her try out each lake!)

We drove up north to the town of Wawa to get some gas before heading back south thru LSPP again.  By the time we got to Katherine Cove, it had started raining, but the views were so pretty, we walked the trail and took pictures anyway:

As we drove down to Pancake Bay Provincial Park, it began pouring rain—no worries, though.  All our outdoor activities were done for the day anyway.  We set up camp, rolled out the awning, and cooked on the grill staying nice and dry.

The next morning, Lake Superior was as calm and peaceful as bathwater.  I took a short stroll along the beach before we left to drive back into the U.S. and to the Upper Peninsula (the “U.P.”) of Michigan.

Once in the U.P., we took a brief detour to see the Upper and Lower Tahquamenon Falls.  First the lower falls:

then the impressive Upper Falls:

We stopped at the Wisconsin/Michigan border for dinner, and it was such a nice night, that we decided to just keep on driving finally arriving home around midnight.  It was a wonder week!