When you get up early, like I have for most of my life, it means more if there is something to get your body and mind quickly stimulated. Last year I spent about a week with family at a rustic 1940's vintage cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Newberry. An unwritten chore for the first person to arise, was to make coffee, using an old fashioned percolator (the kind with the glass bubble on the lid, showing you what's going on inside). We could have used the hand pump over the sink to draw water from an old well for the coffee, but its slight tan color and unknown number of buggies and microbes present spelled "bottled water" instead. The cooking stove used bottled propane gas (stored outside) that had been rigged to work with a 1950's white porcelain kitchen variety, and when you opened the gas valve full tilt, it took the chill off the essentially unheated kitchen area. After breakfast, dishes were done in an old discarded kitchen sink (the faucet was not connected to a water supply, it was for show only), using the above mentioned pump to draw water into large pots, which we used to boil the water to kill the bad things that might have been present. Washing was done in the metal pan shown, and rinsed in the red plastic tub in the adjacent sink section. This process was repeated each day, but we never got tired of the somewhat laborious process of simply making coffee, breakfast and cleaning up afterwards. I'm ready to go back this year, for a longer stay. Sunrises mean more up there.
