Juneteenth, Circus World Museum, and Night with the Cranes

 

This morning Travalon and I were enjoying our lazy Saturday too much to join the local Juneteenth parade with my Union peeps, but we did see them at the party afterwards. Guess who else we saw? Bugs Bunny and Peppa Pig!

We wanted to get some Jamaican food, but the line was long for all the food carts, so we just went to a Mexican restaurant for lunch after giving my Union peeps a ride back to the Labor Temple. Then we drove to Baraboo and went to the Circus World Museum. We pass by it all the time, and I have always been curious. We wandered around the grounds, not wanting to spend too much time inside on such a beautiful day, but eventually we did wander into the Big Top tent, where an actual circus show was going on. Was that ever entertaining! We didn't see the whole thing, but we did see people doing tricks on horseback, and one was a clown. Then we explored the circus wagon pavilion. Here are some photos. This was a little train you could ride for $5. (We did not ride it.)

Here are some beautiful circus wagons.

This is a train car advertising the circus.

And this is a little pony you could ride for $5, but we didn't want to squish it.

I love this waste recepticle!

I don't know why this clown hat has a shamrock on it.

I took these photos of circus wagons with my phone.

The part I found most interesting was a display right near the exit about priests and the circus. Due to a combination of a lot of circus performers coming from Catholic backgrounds and also the fact that the Catholic church has a mandate to try to save all souls, they had more of an outreach to the circuses than other denominations. I had no idea! Then we went to the gift shop and bought a goat.

Travalon named him Gabby after Porky Pig's roommate in old Looney Tunes cartoons. I'm not sure what happened to that character, but he complained nonstop, so maybe he never caught on with audiences. I don't think our Gabby would complain so much. He's very soft.

Our next stop was the Crane Foundation for their big fundraiser. We had never gone before, and it's not cheap, but if we were wine drinkers we could potentially have drunk the whole value. There was so much wine there! It started with little commemorative glasses full of champagne right at the door.

The flag is, obviously, from the earlier festivities. My Union peeps who had marched in the parade each had one, and when I asked where I could get one, the guy who looks like a leprechaun gave me his. Anyway, at the Crane Foundation, we went around looking at all the cranes, and along the path would be different wineries or breweries or restaurants with little samples of their goods. My favorite was a bean salad much like cowboy caviar that Travalon didn't even want to try. There were also tamales, paella, snacks, chocolates, meatballs, and pastries. Here are some photos of the cranes. I don't remember what kinds they are, so sorry I can't explain them better.

I like how this one has a fancy tail like a rooster.

This photo of the blue crane just makes me laugh so much.

Another funny one.

These Siberian cranes are Travalon's favorite.

In the gift shop we each bought a journal.

Mine is the one on the left. I used some more of my gift card from the wellness program at work to buy it. By then we had gotten over 10,000 steps, but none of our walking was continuous enough for my FitBit to give me credit for a workout, so we went to Devil's Lake and took a walk along the South Shore. No photos of that because by then Travalon's camera was running low on space, but it was as beautiful as ever. He did take some videos of the circus show and the cranes, so at some point I'll try to make a YouTube video or two of that. Something for my readers to look forward to.

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Big Boy

 

This morning as Travalon and I were heading out, we heard the train at the crossing by our house. Sure enough, we could see it passing by, just a little train with a few cars. It seemed like a good omen. We drove to Janesville and stopped at the Menards there to get a new camping chair for me, since my old one had kind of died during our last trip to Rochelle a couple of weekends ago. Travalon said his was getting old too, so we got two - they're only $8 each and there's even a rebate (that you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get, and then it's just store credit). Then we took a bunch of back roads to Malta, Illinois to avoid the traffic going to Rochelle. The last time the Big Boy came through, there were tens of thousands of people who flocked to the Railroad Park, and traffic was allegedly horrible.

In Malta we had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in a gas station, really authentic tamales (for me) and a quesadilla (for Travalon) and street corn (for both of us). Then we found the Lions Park, which had bathrooms and just about the only shade in town, where we hung out until about three, when we headed toward the tracks. There was a wide lawn area in front of the tracks, and a local couple around my age and her mother were standing under the shade of the single tree in the area, so we asked if we could share their shade. They said sure, so we set up our camping chairs and chatted with the family, which also included a couple of teenagers, one of each gender. We saw lots of drones flying overhead, and these two planes.

Remember them - they'll show up later in the video. More and more people began to gather, so it was like Benton when we went to see the solar eclipse - enough people to make it festive, but not a horribly large crowd. We kept seeing very long trains go by, and we hoped one wouldn't be passing on the closer track while the Big Boy passed on the further track.

The Union Pacific Big Boy is one of twenty-five colossal steam engines built in the 1940's to haul heavy war freight. It's currently the only one still running, and it apparently weighs 1.2 million pounds. (I'm getting this from Google AI, so feel free to double-check these statistics.) It is going coast to coast as part of the country's 250th birthday celebrations, and Travalon said it would be towing red, white, and blue cars and a caboose. Today it was supposed to get to Rochelle around three and stay there fifteen minutes, then head toward DeKalb with an ETA of 3:30. Travalon was tracking it, so we knew it was running about an hour late. I ran to the Historical Society to use their bathroom, and even though it was one stall for women, I didn't have to wait in line. (Though there was a line when I came out.) Meanwhile another train was passing by, and this one had the most beautiful graffiti ever, but unfortunately neither Travalon nor I got photos or videos, since the previous trains had been the kinds with double-decker cargo boxes that don't tend to have graffiti. We knew, from running into some Union Pacific employees at lunch, that Big Boy would be blowing by at 70 mph, so I shuddered watching kids (and adults) on the track. Finally we could hear the unique whistle sound, and Travalon and I got videos. Here is mine - you can see me flinch from the sound.

Big Boy is VERY big and VERY loud, and I forgot my earplugs in the car, but as the husband of the family we were hanging out with said, "The sound is part of the experience." You can see the wife in this video saying how loud it is, and you can also see the two planes pictured above, which had flown to the west before Big Boy came and then reappeared, following him to the east. I will edit Travalon's version and put it on YouTube with a link here soon. As you can see, there are no red, white, and blue train cars, nor is there a caboose. But it was still extremely cool. And loud.

After that we went to Rochelle, figuring the Railroad Park had cleared out quickly once Big Boy had left. To our surprise, an older couple asked us if the "big train" had already passed. This was an hour after it had been in Rochelle, and it was already an hour late, remember, so they were WAY late. We saw one very long, slow train start to go by, and I took some graffiti photos.

Then it stopped and started to back up even more slowly. A guy from Milwaukee told us there was a road that ends in a circle from which you can see the railyard, so we set off to find that and saw the slowly backing up train was holding up an even longer train with four engines, so we couldn't see much beyond the stopped train, but it did have one good piece of graffiti.

Here's a closer look.

Then we drove to Rockford and had dinner at what we thought was a Japanese restaurant, but they didn't have a public bathroom so first we had to go to the gas station next door, so then we had to buy some beverages there. The people running the restaurant were actually Indonesian, and when I asked for the hot sauce and explained my grad school roommate from Surabaya had introduced me to it, they said they were from Surabaya! Not that huge a coincidence, it's the second-largest city there after Jakarta, but we started chatting about Indonesian cuisine, and it turns out they had a dessert my old roommate used to make with tapioca and coconut milk and fresh fruit, so we had to get it. So delicious! And I still have half my coconut rice with fried chicken for lunch tomorrow. It was a fun way to end our adventure.

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Gig at Bad Art

 

Yesterday I worked from home, and at lunch Travalon and I walked on Governor's Island. The water was very blue.

He had the day off of work, so he went to Watertown and took a walk on Tivoli Island.

I took a walk in our neighborhood on my afternoon break.

This is out of order, but in the morning Travalon was trying to get tickets to AC/DC, who are playing in town next summer, and while he was waiting to get into the site, this little man was walking as the green bar moved further to the right.

He said, "That little man is getting more exercise than I am today!" Then when he came home, we went on another walk after dark (I was wearing my high-vis vest), and then he went to see the Marshall Tucker band while I talked to Tiffy. I said I felt very uncharitable about not liking someone who annoyed me with little things, like saying, "Thus far" instead of "so far," but Tiffy totally understood. She said, "Do they say 'shan't' too?" Not that I've heard, but I wouldn't be surprised! And when I found out this person's politics, because they totally brought it up, then I didn't feel guilty at all about not liking them.

This morning I met my Union peep who looks like a leprechaun at the bank so we could close out our Union bank account, since we merged with another local, then Travalon and I took a walk on Governor's Island. On the way there we saw this pretty tree with a cute Little Free Library in front of it.

Here's a photo from Governor's Island itself.

Then we hung out at home for a bit. I was really doing well at DuoLingo today.

We checked out a trail not too far from our house in the afternoon.

Travalon's Premier League team the Wolves were on in the afternoon, not the morning like usual, and for the first half they held Chelsea to no score, but in the second half, as we drove to my gig at Bad Art in Oregon, Chelsea scored three goals. The poor Wolves - I don't see how they won't be relegated. But miracles can happen in sports, as we would discover later in the day...

The gig was to celebrate our fearless leader having an art show. Her thing is making chickens out of return address labels, and there were some cool ones (I particularly liked "Rainbow Rooster"), but did I think to take a photo of any of them? No. Travalon did take a couple of photos of Bad Art.

We were supposed to play for an hour, but our leader spent the first twelve or so minutes talking about her art, some of it interesting like how her whole family were artists and they were featured in Life magazine, and some of it maybe not so interesting. Then we were supposed to finish at five, but she wanted to keep playing because she had talked so much, and she thought we should play for a full hour. My regular readers will be stunned to learn that I had to recycle some water fiercely, so I said, "I'm done!" and ran to the back room where my mandolin case was. As I was putting the mandolin away, some older guy said, "Before you put that away, can I see it?" I said, "Let me go pee, and then we can talk." As promised, I showed him Mandy, but he grabbed her away and I kind of thought he wasn't going to give her back. I am pretty generous about letting fellow musicians try her out, but I didn't know this guy. He was saying he had checked out another round-back mandolin, but it was only fit for hanging on the wall for decoration, and it was surprising to see one as old as mine in playable condition. Then he asked me a million questions about what kind of pick I used. Meanwhile, Travalon was waiting for me to get ready to leave. This was supposed to be an unpaid gig, but we did get one drink at the bar, so I let Travalon have it. He got a delicious pumpkin concoction, and when I had a couple sips just before the gig, our leader's partner wondered if it was a good idea to drink before playing, as if many of the most famous musicians weren't three sheets to the wind most of the time they were onstage. Our leader gave Hardingfele $2.50 from the tips when they had played there the previous weekend, so Hardingfele gave it to me, since I wasn't getting paid (they were paid $25 each last weekend), but then we each made $8 in tips, plus the venue did decide to give us each $10, so I actually made $20.50 at an "unpaid" gig. Not bad. My big disappointment is that I put my FitBit on my right wrist to get my steps for the hour, and by the second song I'd gotten them, but my playing didn't register as a workout. I was curious to see what FitBit would have thought I was doing.

Travalon and I went to a newish Mexican restaurant not far from home that we'd been meaning to check out, and I got a huitlacoche quesadilla and a thing I thought would be a sweet corn cake, but it was a strange yet aesthetically pleasing crust with salsa and cheese on it.

(I should have thought to take this picture before taking the first bite.) I know what you are wondering: "So Sombrero Famoso, which salsa is the hot one, the green or the red? La verde o la roja?" and I would say, "Yes. Si." Notice how it's the colors of the Mexican flag. Then I had to use the bathroom, and when I passed the bar, there were these sad balloons spelling out: "Viva Mexic."

I asked the bartender, "Donde está el O?" and she said, "El explotó." I feel like there's a story there, but my Spanish isn't good enough to find out que pasó. Meanwhile, Travalon was looking at his phone, as he is wont to do when I go to the restroom, and he was stunned to see that the Badgers were beating the Washington Huskies. What?? They can barely score, never mind win!! We came home and watched the final minutes of the game, and they won!!! Everyone was so excited that they rushed the field!

I was excited for a completely different reason too - my new license plates finally arrived!

I did get my first choice of personalized license plate! Travalon says he will get the Crane Foundation one next May, when he needs to get new stickers, so maybe he can get a clever personalized one at that time. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments. I'm thinking TRVLON. Or TRAVLN.

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