Girls Get Away – The Island Edition

This past weekend some friends and I headed to cottage country to enjoy our annual girls weekend. We always leave Aly in charge of determining where we are going. She is obsessive about travel planning and always choses great places for us to stay. That being said, I was a little concerned when I saw this picture of the cabin she had rented.

And by concerned I mean I wondered how many of us would make it out of there alive. Still, Aly assured me that there was a beautiful screened in porch and amazing views on an almost private island. She has never led me astray in the past, so I prayed that I could outrun at least one of the other girls if need be, and I packed my bags for a weekend away.

Alyson and I usually travel up to the cottage together, and this time was no different. We needed to drop her kids off at her mother’s place about two hours from home and a half hour away from where we were staying. This made for a pretty cramped ride for myself and Gabby, Alyson’s German Sheppard.

We picked up Jackie after dropping the kids off (and gaining way more leg room!) and headed off to the dock. Our cottage owner Dave, picked us up on what appeared to be a homemade barge, and helped us load all of our stuff up. What we stumbled upon was a beautiful little log cabin nestled in the trees. Alyson was right, it was perfect. Dave helped us lug all of our pink wine coolers legitimate wilderness gear up the nearly 400 stairs before taking off on his barge.

We unloaded and enjoyed our first dinner at the cottage. Meghan was scheduled to come in around 1 am, and since we were on an island we needed to go pick her up on the mainland. This created a bit of a problem as we were fairly exhausted and were almost certain that we would fall asleep and leave helpless Meghan stranded on the mainland with nothing but 7 bottles of pink wine coolers legitimate wilderness gear and about a dozen bags of chips. Certainly the only solution was to head to the mainland before we got too comfortable so that we could pre-emptively rescue our soon-to-be-marooned-friend. To pass the time on the mainland we watched Bridget Jones’s Diary on the entertainment system in the back of Jackie’s car. No kidding. We really rough it.

The next morning we headed back to the mainland to pick up Misty. There was no threat of leaving her stranded as she arrived at the exact perfect time – late enough that we had already had coffee but early enough that even with our best efforts no one was more than three drinks deep. With Misty in tow we took a little tour around the lake. This might be when we realised our emergency paddle was missing. Jackie said she heard it fall out of the boat on our midnight run to pick up Meg but no one can be sure where we lost it. One thing was certain though – we knew it had to be replaced and we knew that being on an island the only source for a replacement paddle would be our neighbours. More on that later. The rest of the day was spent swimming, bathing in the lake, jumping off the dock, boating and drinking.

The next day was more of the same except we started this day off by circumnavigating our island, Lost style (editor’s note – only Misty and I recognized it as “Lost style”, everyone else probably thought of it as just a normal hike around an island). We also fulfilled our girls weekend tradition of skinny dipping and we saved Gabby from certain death by spider attack with just as much screaming as you would probably imagine.

We recovered from our spider related trauma by making s’mores. Since we didn’t have a fire pit and suffer from severe laziness, we chose the to roast the marshmallows on the barbecue with varying degrees of success.

After dinner we delivered Misty back to the mainland so she could travel home to her beloved Sophie. Later that night we knew we had a mission at hand. We had to go lay claim to our neighbours paddle so that Dave wouldn’t know that we had lost ours (notice how I cleverly avoided the word “steal”). Jackie, Alyson, Meghan and I put on our black ninja gear and headed down to the boat under the cover of night. Since we obviously didn’t have a paddle and we couldn’t exactly fire up the motor on the boat we had to get creative. This is where one might ask, “why didn’t you just walk down to the neighbour’s dock to lay claim to their paddle?” Well, really, where’s the fun in that? Besides, haven’t you seen The Italian Job? Robbery by water is pretty much guaranteed to be successful! Our lack of paddle to get paddle problem was solved when we took what I can only assume was a decorative oar off the wall of the cottage and used this in our watery quest. Being the excellent thieves we are the mission was successful and we were officially up one emergency paddle, after having spent most of the weekend driving around the lake without one.

Our final day on our island retreat was spent lounging around on our screened in porch avoiding the rain and keeping close tabs on our pilfered paddle before Dave came to pick us up and barge us back to the mainland.

Another successful girls weekend away! I cannot recommend the cabin we stayed in enough. It was rustic but charming, cozy but not too small and Dave, our cottage owner, was helpful, friendly and just a genuinely nice guy. The cabin was very, very reasonably priced as well. If anyone would like information on how to rent this gorgeous place let me know. Exciting update – there has been talk of a winter version of our girls weekend, perhaps up to Collingwood.
Any excuse for naked snow angels, right ladies?