And I kind of got into canoeing mostly when I convinced my friends to buy a canoe with me, which was a little bit silly ’cause none of us had a car or way to transport a canoe, and a couple of us knew how to canoe and a couple of us didn’t. But we were convinced. Well, I was convinced and I convinced them and they went ahead or we went ahead.
We scoured Facebook Marketplace, found a canoe there, and the person selling it lived near the Huron River and we live — we were living in Ann Arbor at the time and now we live in [city] and the person lived in Dexter near the Huron River which is like a little bit upriver from Ann Arbor. Uh, and he agreed to meet us at the river and sell us this canoe so he met in there at this boat launch and we bought his canoe for a hundred dollars. And then we canoed it back to Ann Arbor. And we did this the first week of April a handful of years ago, and it snowed a little bit on the way. We were the only ones on the river, but we had a blast. And then we get back to a little outside Ann Arbor and we start looking in the woods just for a patch of what looks like unused land and we find some between the river and the train tracks, and we pull our canoe up into the woods, and then we walk back into town. We had got dropped off by a friend in Dexter. Oh, and we brought a bike lock with us, and we bike locked the canoe to a tree.
And there the canoe has lived pretty much since. It’s actually worked out great. Everyone told us we were so silly, and it’s been incredible. We did have to move the canoe a couple times because it accidentally did end up being somebody’s land, but the people were very nice in both cases and one even gave us canoe paddles and stuff like that. And now the canoe’s in a really good spot where it doesn’t get bothered. I don’t think it’s privately owned land. Just like between the road and the river, and you can’t really get there unless you walk through the river because it’s this huge swamp and undergrowth. And it works out great.