This fall, I had the privilege to be invited to Cry of the Lost Hunter Campground for Sunday dinner with Frances Cushman and her daughter Ann. Located on St. Froid Lake at Quimby, Maine ,the campground was home to my boys and Nadiene and I in the summer for many years.

Here I am playing away in an extremely cold and stiff wind. Whistle worked great!

Owen and Frances Cushman created the campground from an undeveloped piece of shoreline property over a long period of time. Originally the campground was full of tents and folks with trailers in the summer, but now most of the occupants are local people that enjoy being there all summer and have settled in with larger trailers that stay all year long.
It was a really bad day weather wise when we left Presque Isle and the wind was up even worse by the time we had driven the sixty miles up to the lake. Even though it had been quite a few years since we had been to the campground, everything looked pretty much as we had left it on our last visit. Mother Nature seems to maintain things at a pretty nice level if she doesn’t get stressed and the fall foliage was at its best even if the day was dark and wet.
We had a nice long visit at the big log cabin where Frances lives in the summer and of course a tour of the property and a chance to see some folks we knew who were getting in the last visit to camp for the season.

After a leisurely dinner with all the good things that go with homemade cooking and big piece of raspberry pie, I decided the rain had let up sufficiently to go for a walk. The wind was still blowing at about twenty five miles an hour and the shore was getting hit with some big waves from the whitecaps out on the main part of the lake. Nadiene picked up her camera and came along with me as I grabbed my whistle from the Mazda and headed for the beach.

I had been testing the new Traveler whistle in A and thought it would be a real test to be able to play it outdoors under some tough conditions. Frances, Ann and our friend Diane Barnes stayed on the porch to see how the whistle sounded and how far away they would be able to hear it against the wind.
We wandered up the beach and I played the Dance of the Frenzied Turkeys all the way. Nadiene took a bunch of pictures of the cabins along the way and was the on site expert to attest to the playability and staying power of the little whistle against the wind. It was great fun and there were several places that I would have played for a while, but everything was pretty wet and the weather held off just long enough to get in a good walk.

The girls back at camp said they could hear me playing until we were completely out of sight which I found surprising as the wind really started to blow. The Traveler played without a hitch. No wind kill even though I did a full 360 degree in slow motion and the wind was very strong. This is a very pleasant whistle to play and the more I play it the better I like the Key of A. After getting back to camp I gave everyone a short concert of some of my tunes that I’ve been working on and then it was time to head
for home.
We all had a great day and got home just before dark. You try to miss the moose and driving in the dark is not a good idea in the fall of the year. Later in the evening , a tremendous gust of air came down out of Canada and the next morning the color was gone as the leaves blew off the trees. You could say we got in the last nice day of the fall season and had a chance to whistle our way through it in style!