Canoeing, Episode Three

It's snowing and blowing like mad outside but I'm thinking of summer and how nice it would be gliding across the water in my canoe.  Last post I showed you Bell's Lake; the other local lake we've paddled in is a group we know as the Robson Lakes.  With an undeveloped shoreline except for Participation Lodge, a community home for those with complex needs, the lake is small but really worth exploring.

These lakes are so small I might not have bothered, but they turned out to be quite interesting, easy to get in to, and kept us busy for an hour and a half on a beautiful summer day.  This time we used my regular sized canoe and paddled together; I got to sit in the bow with my camera.

We don't spend a lot of time out on the open water; we prefer to explore the shorelines.

You actually start out on a smaller lake, Hines Lake, but a narrow channel takes you through to Robson Lake.  Lots of shallow water and fallen branches to navigate.

With the thick aquatic vegetation in places, it meant steering for the open channels.

These bulrushes made nice reflections along the shore and provided a splash of brighter green.

And this group of weathered stumps caught my attention.  I just missed getting a picture of a turtle that slipped away into the water.

And then we came to  the waterlilies.

With a little bit of direction and practice my buddy was able to get me close enough to get some good pictures.  These are the common White Water-lily.

You may not know the story of Claude Monet, the great French painter, the founder of the 'Impressionist' style of open-air landscape painting.  In his later life Monet established a garden at Giverny, outside Paris, with a large pond, which he made into his water garden.  He became immersed in painting pictures of waterlilies and their reflections in the pond for the last 20 years of his life.

His final gift to the people of France was a group of enormous waterlily paintings (6 feet high and 40-50 feet long) that wrap around two large oval rooms built for this purpose in L'Orangerie Gallery in Paris.  We had the chance to visit both Monet's garden at Giverny and his waterlily paintings in Paris in the years before my paralysis, and it was just amazing to see the link between the actual water garden and the famous paintings.  So I was glad to get some pictures of my own.