Japanese Garden in Rockford

Yesterday Travalon and I went to Rockford and had lunch at the Beefaroo, then we went to the Anderson Japanese Garden. We went through it once, then we looked at the map they had given us and realized we had gone through it backwards, so we went through it again and paid attention to each special feature. Afterwards we went to the Sinissippi Garden further down the road, so it was a very botanical day for us.

Today I had a gig at the orchard where my band plays every autumn, but the proprietress tried to cancel because the weather was so lousy. We didn't know, so we showed up and played for an hour anyway, and she gave us each a bag of apples for our troubles. It was so cold and wet that my fingers did not want to cooperate, but it hardly mattered because our audience basically consisted of our fiddler's two preteen grandkids.

Here are some photos from our adventures since returning from California. This first one is a cactus at the Nature Conservancy land near Spring Green with a couple of fruits on it.

Next are some shots from High Cliff State Park and, of course, Lambeau Field.

This next shot is of Travalon as the ferry arrived at the port on Washington Island.

Next, the old water tower on Rock Island:

This is the inside of the boathouse on Rock Island. Some Icelandic guy was going to make the island a resort way back in the day, and he built this beautiful building. I did not get a good shot of the outside of it, sorry.

Someone got a little creative with the rocks on the aptly-named Rock Island:

This is a beautiful view from the port on Washington Island:

On Washington Island there is a lake called Little Lake, presumably because it is on an island in the Big Lake:

Here are shots of the outside and inside of the stave church on Washington Island:

This boat looks like it goes with the stave church! It mysteriously appeared at the marina across the river from us.

Here is a shot of the Japanese garden in Rockford.

This is the gravel garden. It had a more scalloped pattern earlier, but the second time we went through, they had changed it to little squares like farm fields.

Finally, two videos! The first one is of the whitecaps on Lake Michigan as we were taking the ferry across it to Washington Island.

This is a "deer chaser" in the Japanese garden. It fills with water and then makes a loud clunk as it hits the basin. These were traditionally used to frighten deer out of gardens in Japan.

Famous Hat