Hiking on the Ice Age Trail

I hope my readers had a good weekend and got to enjoy some of the mild weather while you still can. Friday night I got two pizzas and joined Kathbert and Jilly Moose at Richard Bonomo’s house. Jilly Moose brought Packer cookies. Travalon, meanwhile, was watching Oconomowoc’s high school football team in the playoffs; they were down by 21 points but managed to tie things up and then lost by a touchdown in the last four seconds of the game. Heartbreaking!

Saturday Travalon and one of our neighbors got our boat into our garage, where it can hopefully wait out the winter until we can take it out on the water again. Then he and I took Rodney and went hiking on the Ice Age Trail outside of Lodi, where there is a three-mile loop that goes into the Baraboo Range. This is a range of ancient mountains, over a billion years old, which are just hills now. That’s what a billion years will do to anyone. Then we stopped for a quick soda at the rival resort on Crystal Lake, where they were not nearly as friendly, before going to the resort on the peninsula for lunch. Amazing cheeseburgers! We watched the Badger game before heading to Rich’s next-door neighbor’s birthday party. Kathbert, Jilly Moose, Luxuli, and Prairie Man came too. There were no party games, just food (Travalon and I brought bread, Luxuli and Prairie Man brought a salad, and Rich made a pork dish), and dessert: Rich’s Black Magic cake and pumpkin cream liqueur courtesy of Jilly Moose. We all called it a night kind of early – I think this time change has hit us all very hard! For some reason it always seems worse to me than the spring one, even though at that time you lose an hour of sleep.

Yesterday Travalon and I watched most of the Packer game at the East Side Club with some other members, and we all brought dishes for a potluck. However, the Packers had not shown up to play, or so it seemed, because both their offense and their defense were nonexistent. Travalon and I finally gave up and decided we needed to get outside on such a beautiful day, so we left just as the fourth quarter started and took Rodney to the dog park. Between Travalon looking at his phone, and texts I got from Tiffy, we found out the Pack roared back to life and almost tied things up right at the end… if Rodgers hadn’t thrown an interception. If they’d played like that the whole game, maybe they would have handed Carolina their first defeat this year. Travalon and I met Jilly Moose, Luxuli, Prairie Man, and OK Cap for dinner at Bellitalia, since Luxuli and Prairie Man had square dancing about a block away from there. Then Travalon and I went to the new Peanuts movie, which was cute but seemed to be a little kinder in spirit than the original comic strip. For example, Snoopy was helping Charlie Brown try to win over the Little Red-Headed Girl, when in the comic strip he just regarded him as “that round-headed kid.” I won’t tell you whether Charlie Brown gets the girl or not – you’ll just have to see the movie yourself.

Famous Hat