Let's kind of go back to the beginning and tell me a little bit about how you two met.
So this was a number of years ago in Door County, right?
Well, actually it was in Green Bay at West High School.
We were both teaching there.
And a lot of our students would say things like, you know, to him.
Yeah, they were like, they were like, Mr. Meyer, you got to go down and check out Ms. K because like,
you guys like come back on Monday and you're telling the same kind of stories like fishing and hunting.
And I'm like, really?
I'm like, what does she teach?
And I think they have the consumer ad.
And I'm like, oh, well, I'll go check it out.
So they're a little drive by and I'm like, huh.
Well, I got to investigate this.
One of our first dates was meeting and going fishing at midnight on opening day.
And then of course, their big thing was to try and catch us dating.
You know, so we had back before, no phones.
And you know, one guy had this big, huge video recorder.
And he chased us around what we came out of this bar downtown.
And there they are in a car.
They pulled up and they're like, we got you guys.
And I'm just like, oh, man.
Yeah.
So that's how we met.
And the first time he came over, I was showing him some pictures in a photo album.
And I had a picture of my grandpa who was kneeling down by some rabbits and pheasants.
And I said, you know, I learned to hunt with my grandpa.
And he looked at it and he went.
And beagles.
And beagles.
Yeah, the dogs.
And beagles.
And my grandpa was a beagle guy and we hunted rabbits.
I mean, I could have been looking at my grandpa there.
In fact, he said that to me.
Yeah.
And then the couple months later, we were out, went out to her grandparents' cottage.
And she had to meet somebody at the cottage.
I don't remember what it was.
But I had brought my little boat.
And she's like, just go out there and go down the shoreline where they're building that new house.
She set off that point and go out this far and cast a number 11 silver and black Rapala toward shore.
And just kept, you know, long cast toward shore and just ran off that point.
Needless to say, he didn't have girls telling him where to go fishing.
Well, I grew up in Eau Claire and fishing for smallmouth.
And that's what I did all summer.
I fished smallmouth.
I love fishing smallmouth.
And back then, you know, everybody kept everything all the way.
So to keep, catch smallmouth over 15 inches was like a big deal.
You know, we just didn't.
I went out there in my very first cast.
I'm like, okay, I'll do what I'm told.
So I went out there and I made a cast and bait hit the water.
A couple cranks.
There's giant smallmouth pounded.
I came out of the water as an 18-incher.
And I'm just like, are you kidding me?
I caught seven in a row on seven casts.
I'm like, I am marrying this girl.
I went back and I was just like, this is unbelievable.
You tell people literally that that's what she decided.
I was like, this is unbelievable.
I just was shocked.
Well, you certainly couldn't have been restricted in the number of men that wanted to fish.
You had to be the high prize here.
It made him the one.
Well, um...
Yeah, honey.
Come on, you're thinking awfully hard.
No, no, it was just a thing.
I always say the way he talked about stuff and the enthusiasm he has for everything.
He taught sales and marketing.
Let's just say he could sell anything to anyone because he told himself to me.
Well, she taught family consumer ed teaching people to watch out for those sales and marketing people.
But I bought in.
We came up here on adventures that I had never been on but always wished I had gone on.
We'd come up and drive logging roads and go fish on little lakes and camp out in a tent on an island on a lake.
And I just wasn't having I just thought.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was good.
Good times.
So then, how did that lead to where we are today?
What was the progress that led from teaching in Green Bay to being up here?
Well, this was always kind of when you grow up in Eau Claire.
If you had North a couple of hours, you're here and coming from Dork County in Eastern Wisconsin.
It seems like people don't make that trip pretty much Highway 51 is kind of, you know, or 13 maybe.
But people don't really head west that much.
So to go from there all the way up here is the long drive.
But because this was kind of the area that I knew and I knew she loved it.
We did a lot of trips up here.
You know, we didn't have a cabin.
We camped in National Forest.
It's a while.
We splurged into cabin and we always hunted deer hunted up here even though we're in the middle of deer, you know, crazy numbers of deer back there.
We'd come up here and we loved it.
I mean, it was, you'd go the old season and not see another hunter a lot of times.
And, you know, there were times when the deer population was really strong.
It's still pretty good.
But we always said this would be a place where we'd want to have a cabin.
And the graduation to the fishing and the way we fish because we like fishing wilderness rivers and small lakes and out of a canoe or a cargo canoe that we use.
That kind of happened because I asked him to go up to canoe country with me up into the Coetico where I love to go.
And the first thing he said to me is, well, can you fish up there?
And I'm like, well, yeah.
He was not just paddling or fishing to him.
I'm like, yeah.
Well, so we went up on our first trip up there and it was kind of magical.
We both just had a great time and caught lots of fish.
And that was kind of when we came back here then, we started taking what we learned about fishing out of a canoe there and applying it here.
Even though we had a big boat, we'd go out in big water.
It was just something about being on the small lakes and rivers and just quiet and peaceful.
And still catching big fish.
It was a lot of fun.
And then we had an opportunity to buy just a crappy old cabin on a lake.
It had been lived in a lot of years and we bought it.
And that was kind of when we knew that at some point we're going to take that down and we're going to live there after we retire.
And that was kind of when we started our guide business.
Once we had that cabin, we kind of had a home base.
We had some people over at the lodge, a boulder lodge, the new owners there.
The guides that they had there didn't really have the right focus for what the lodge wanted.
The lodge wanted that whole teaching kind of focus, family, kids, which is what we were all about.
And so they asked us if we would guide for their customers and we kind of partner.
And between Boulder Lodge and Ghost Lake Lodge, those two, we work with them pretty closely.
And people come up for a week's vacation and they stand the lake and they fish the lake.
But they don't often venture, you know, they don't have the gear or the, you know, they don't have multiple vehicles even when you do a river.
You need to usually pick up and, you know, you got to, so we kind of found that niche and we love taking kids.
Well, and our kids, our kids grew up and laughed, you know, they darned it all.
So we didn't have them to drag around the wilderness fishing anymore.