Tropical Music and Tubing

I hope that my readers had a good weekend. Thursday Travalon and I got to do something exciting: meet Richard Bonomo’s brother! They don’t look exactly alike, but I could see a slight family resemblance.

Friday Travalon and I had really delicious fish at the Cherokee Country Club, then we went to Matcha Tea House for their Midsummer Night Brunch, not to eat (since we hadn’t been sure what they would serve) but to try the meertz that Funk Factory made with their tea. We ended the evening by going to Capital Brewery and watching a reggae band called Natty Nation. What a wonderful evening!

Saturday Travalon and I went to Crema Café for brunch, then we walked to Fired Up and painted the little clay cacti we made a couple of weeks ago. We went to Atwood Fest, which is like a smaller Willy Street Festival, including two guys dressed as dinosaurs for no obvious reason. We listened to a couple of enjoyable bands there. Then we tried once again to find the headwaters of the Yahara River and ended up stumbling across a great hiking area, the Token Creek Conservancy. Lots of springs and pine trees – it was so beautiful! We had dinner at Mariner’s to hear Banana Wind, a Jimmy Buffet cover band, but then we realized Bahama Bob was playing at Captain Bill’s so we ran over there to hear him too. What a weekend of tropical music! The only part of the day that didn’t work out was that the Mallards had a very quick game, so when we went to Bierock to watch the fireworks after the game, they had already transpired. Anyway, that is a very small complaint about an otherwise wonderful day.

Yesterday after Mass, Rich had brunch at his house, then he, Travalon, Cecil Markovitch, the Single B-Boy, Rich's Brazilian housemate and his wife and daughter, and I drove down to Albany to go tubing on the Sugar River. (The Brazilians decided to rent a canoe instead of tubes.) The river was very crowded with people tubing, some of them blasting music at an obnoxious level, but someone we passed gave Travalon and me some pretzels. The river was very slow that day, so we started just after one and didn’t get off the river until dinnertime. We went to the Center Tavern in Albany because a drunk guy had once told Travalon and me that they had the best cheeseburgers in the state there, and they were very good. So it was a wonderful, relaxing weekend of beautiful weather, tropical music, and floating down the river.

Famous Hat