Duck Ride and Chinese Lights Festival

I hope my readers got to get outside to enjoy this unseasonably beautiful weekend. Friday evening Travalon and I went to the East Side Club for their fish fry, partly because of my propensity for supporting the underdog. Anyway, we think their catfish is delicious. Then we went to a small brewery called House of Brews, which was also very uncrowded. Are we just that good at picking the not-hot spots? I prefer a place to be uncrowded, but it probably doesn’t bode well for their bottom line.

Saturday Travalon, Rodney, and I drove to Rock Springs near Baraboo, where there is a spring with fresh water gushing out of it and also a state natural area called Ableman’s Gorge where we hiked to a rock called Van Hise Rock. It is in the Baraboo Hills, so the rock is the ancient Baraboo Quartzite which is over a billion years old and has a lovely purple hue. After our hike, we filled our water bottles at the spring and then drove to Reedsburg, where we stopped at a place called the Corner Pub for lunch. They had the best cream ale! It almost tasted like cream soda. We drove a little beyond town to Lake Redstone County Park for another walk. It was such a gorgeous day. We went to Devil’s Lake on the way back home and hiked a little there too. In the evening we had been planning to go to a silent movie downtown, but we couldn’t get tickets, so we went to the Fountain. (Again with supporting the underdog.) That place is in rougher shape every time we go – now they only have the back section open for private functions. They have a new soul food place on the front right side, so we got dinner there and ate outside, then we got some dessert at Red Elephant Chocolates across the street. Since we couldn’t get into the movie, we decided to check out the live music at the Fountain, a guitarist named Durango McMurphy. He was really good, but we were about it for audience. Rich had to come downtown to change the clocks on the church back to Standard Time, so we hung out with him in the church library and discussed racism, which seems to be my favorite topic lately. I’m not sure why, but I apologize to my readers who are sick of hearing about it.

Sunday Travalon and I went to the East Side Club for their inaugural Sunday brunch, but the front was all locked so we went around the side and found a club regular who told us it had been canceled, as had the Halloween party. Is there some way we are supposed to know this? How does everyone else know these things? So we went to World of Beer for “beerunch” and had “beermosas” along with brunch. It was another lovely day, so we played some tennis (and my backhand has already improved since last time), and then we talked about canoeing, but I am scared of our canoe since falling out of it the second time. Instead we went to the Dells and took a Duck ride through Lake Delton and the Lower Dells, which is full of cool rock formations. Tiffy texted me that there was a Chinese light show at a botanical garden in Milwaukee, and that was their final night. Because Travalon is such an adventurous guy, he said, “Let’s go!” so we drove there while listening to that pathetic Packers game. Our poor Pack are just not very good this year. The light show was beautiful, and I got lots of photos of things like a giant fan and playful pandas. Afterwards we had dinner at a restaurant called That’s Amore; I thought Chinese would be fitting after our adventure, but Travalon was in an Italian mood, and I will never argue about Italian food! I had spaghetti with seafood, and there was so much that I also had it for lunch today. Yum!

Famous Hat