This shot comes from a little lake outside Plevna, Ontario, Canada. If you’ve never heard of Plevna, don’t worry, you’re probably not the only one. In fact, to get to this lake you’ll have to travel about 30-40 minutes away from Plevna on a half-paved, half-dirt road. This is not an HDR image, because I took this picture before I got into HDR photography. Nevertheless, it holds a close place in my heart because it reminds me of my childhood.
My family first started going to this particular spot in Canada when I was ten years old. Back then, the road coming in took more like an hour and was entirely dirt, and just about 1 ¼ lanes wide (for 2 way traffic) just about everywhere. I’ll never forget that first trip though. We stayed in a wooden cabin perched on a peninsula that might as well have been an island. You had to load all your luggage (and food for a week) into wooden flat-bottom boats and motor it across the lake from the parking area. Once there, you opened up all the windows and let the cross-breeze cut through the cabin. There was a hammock, swimming, woods to explore, and all the fishing you ever wanted. In the following years we encountered bats, mice, ferrets, turtles, frogs, snakes, moose, and eagles (half of which have been inside the actual cabin). In short, bliss for an adolescent boy.
This particular shot, though, is the view of the lake as you pull in from the main road. It’s the view I waited for while making the 13 hour trip that would tell me we finally arrived. It’s where we loaded up our boats with our stuff, where we frog hunted in the evening, where we stopped to get night crawlers for the next day’s expedition, where my old dog Petey loved to jump in the water, where we would unload our canoe, and just two years ago where I took my oldest daughter to swim for the first time. Yeah, it’s a little special to me.
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