In which Dozer attempts to send us to the bottom of the river

I've wanted to do some canoeing all summer, but hadn't had any success, with people either busy, scared of water, and missing out on a Boundary Waters trip, and time was running out!  I made plans to go on one of my Mondays off with Mike, but it ended up being well over 100 degrees with the heat index so we called it off, and luckily I was able to go to work that day and take a later weekday off, when Mike and I were able to get up to Taylors Falls to canoe the same route Rich and I did last summer, Interstate State Park to William O'Brien State Park, about 17 miles on the St. Croix river.

I brought Dozer along, since his whole purpose is to be my "adventure" dog, so this was to be his shakedown cruise.  We put all the important stuff in a waterproof bag just in case his fascination with flying things proved our undoing, and pushed off from Interstate rather late, at almost 1pm.  We had a plan to get to Osceola and then see if we had time to make it to William O'Brien before the last shuttle back (supposed to be a 5-7 hour trip, we had about six to make it there).

We got off to a good start other than Dozer leaping in after a stick when we were only about 200ft from the landing, but we were able to recover him underway and headed downriver.  Turns out Dozer weighs just enough to unbalance a small canoe like that, so before long, Mike and I both could feel the work our core muscles were doing leaning this way and that to counter Dozer's almost constant moving.

Relaxing at Osceola after tiring the pup out making him swim after me against the current

In less than an hour and a half we'd hit Osceola, which is about the 1/3rd point, and decided to rest up there a little then push on further, as we had plenty of time.  Dozer had mostly calmed down at this point after a nice swim at our rest stop, so we made better time until we took a side channel and started to wonder if we'd ever rejoin the river again.  Just when we were starting to consider portaging the canoe back to the main channel, we  found a gap barely wide enough to scrape through and were back on track.

Dozer on bug watch.  If it flies, it dies.

Just like last time we did this route, we hit the end a little sooner than expected and were able to rest for about 40 minutes before the bus ride back to our car.  Dozer slept on my lap, crushing me the whole way back, but our first outdoor adventure was a rousing success!