Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Labor Day Weekend Addenda


Two things I forgot to mention about our adventure on Saturday:

We passed a fascinating place, so we had to stop. It was a county park that was full of cement statues created by a self-taught artist who could neither read nor write. He sculpted them in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s when he was already quite old, so they depict life around the turn of the last century. Lots of horses pulling carts and things like that. He incorporated little pieces of glass and other stuff he found in the cement. I took some pictures – it was quite impressive!

We stopped in a tiny town that may have been called Preston because Travalon remembered going to a bar there at least twenty years ago that was full of cacti, and the proprietor wore a cowboy hat and boots. He said the décor included cattle skulls. We found a bar called La Rosa, which sounded promising, but as soon as we walked in, he knew it wasn’t the place. “This is too big,” he said. It was midday, and the only people in there were two women: the friendly bartender and a very odd older lady who may have been inebriated. When we told them our sad story, the odd lady told us she knew what bar we meant. It was called the Cactus Cantina, and she had been a co-owner with two other people, but they kept fighting so she let them buy her out. She said that establishment had been closed for years, and the building has since been a strip club, but she wasn’t sure what was there now. It wasn’t in that town but back toward Tomahawk. We didn’t bother to go back to try to find it, but what are the odds that the owner of the very establishment we sought would be at the one we stumbled into?

Famous Hat

1 comment:

Travalon said...

La Rosa was actually in Prentice,WI. A small town on hwy. 8 west of Rhinelander. The concrete park was fascinating!