The Last Day

..for this cottage visit. My sister's family takes over the cottage for the next two weeks. 

Part of the day was spent preparing for our departure..It is somewhat like renting a house on vacation, where you have to leave the place perfectly clean and tidy as new clients will be moving in after you leave and you do want your deposit back! So by the end of the day we were pretty much ready for an early morning departure tomorrow.

It has been really hot these last couple of days...an actual heat wave..but we were lucky to have a good breeze blowing in off the water out front which kept us cool enough ..as long as we avoided the dock; there was not much breeze back there at all!  Whew! Hot hot..(extras) I did go down long enough for one last swim though, but there was no lounging around in the sun afterward! 

There were no new wildlife sightings today.. Methinks creatures in the wild are smarter than humans sometimes; they know enough to shelter-in-place in such weather! 

But there were still other little surprises...We actually had a somewhat colourful sunset! ( main) And in the evening, as we were sitting out in the porch, we could hear the loon calling..for the first time this season.That haunting call makes your heart sing! Then, when I was up in the middle of the night, I happened to glance out the window into the darkness toward our sandbar/marshy area and voila! The fireflies were out in full force and twinkling! Absolutely magical! And overhead? Brilliant stars...Wow..what a lovely farewell from Mother Nature! - sort of a "Y'all come back now, you hear? Don't be a stranger". And that we will surely do....

PS: Oh, and the bat? He is still sleeping in the umbrella on the dock. He is there every  morning now, which has not been a problem yet, as we have had no need to open the umbrella! It will, however, soon become a challenge. How do we gently evict him? We want him around - he loves to eat mosquitoes and we have more than we need! My sister and I are intending to get a bat house for him, but will he be interested after having enjoyed the comfort of an umbrella fold? And ... we are not sure if our other family members will be as keen on keeping him around as we are...stay tuned.