Monday, August 9, 2010

Swimming in the Quarry

My troop of Girl Scouts picked a great day to reunionize and go swimming in the granite quarry in Waite Park. I had been there before but never in the middle of summer. It's a crowded place! The weather was hot and humid so it was a perfect place to cool off. At only $4 per carload, this is a sweet deal. The photo is a little dark but you can see some heads bobbing in the water and some neon colored floating devices in the distance. In the far distance you might be able to make out the people lined up on the granite cliffs, waiting their turn to jump into the deep, deep water of the quarry. The quarry had a nice dock for those who prefer to jump from a height of 12-18 inches above the water. There are a variety of heights to jump off depending on where you stand around the quarry. You can jump anywhere from a two feet cliff to a thirty feet cliff and others in between those two. Where did I jump in? Are you kidding? I slid into the water off a rock. The water felt great; cool, refreshing, and invigorating. I felt great until that one moment where I went to perch myself on an underwater rock and felt something in my back pocket. Crap, my cell phone! I, who usually forget the cell phone, who gets in trouble for not having it with me, went swimming with it in my pocket. Lucky for me I don't have a blackberry or an I-phone. I have a three year old tracfone that was starting to give out anyway. For some unknown reason this phone saves up almost all the texts I write and then chooses a day in a subsequent month to send the texts out and confuse everyone on my contact list. I took the cell phone apart and put the three pieces into a bag of white rice and sealed it tight. I hope the rice will absorb all the moisture and allow the tracfone to work again.

2 comments:

Dianne said...

When did you go to the Quarry? You were a half hour from our Getaway! My camper neighbor took her daughter and her daughter's high school friends to the Quarry last Saturday. They told me the water was crystal clear. JoLynn said she thought of inviting me. I told her I would not jump from a cliff of that altitude. I had heard about the jumping. She said, oh you could have just gone in the clear water. I said, maybe next trip!

Sue said...

You should go! The place looks like a tropical paradise.

Hallaway

I have only been to Maplewood State Park once before. The time of the year was autumn and we thought we could snag a campsite. Wrong. Despit...