Camping at Castle Rock Lake

I hope my readers enjoyed the long weekend. Travalon and I started it off quietly, having fish on the patio at Mariner’s. Saturday we drove to Castle Rock County Park and set up our tent, then we went to Mass at St. Patrick’s in Mauston, the church I used to always see from the interstate. These days the lovely gold accents are a dark reddish-brown, but it is still a beautiful church. After Mass we went to a place near the campground called Portofino’s, but it had an incredibly loud cover band playing. We did take a walk to a nearby beach with a little wooden boat for kids to play on and a lovely view of an island. There was a tiki bar, but it was shut. We then went to a place called Shipwreck Bay for dinner; the restaurant was inside and had a great view of the lake, but if you wanted to sit outside, you would have had to endure an even louder cover band. I think I got some eardrum damage just from walking past them! When we returned to our campsite, we tried to start a fire but had no success. Everyone around us had a roaring fire, so we felt like total losers. Fortunately the Chicagoans at the next campsite included one outdoorsy type who could start a fire like a pro, and she gave us some pointers. There were supposed to be northern lights, so after our fire died down we walked down to the beach and looked toward the north. We saw some shimmering above us, but was it just clouds or the actual aurora borealis? By then it was nearly midnight, so we were too tired to stick around and figure it out.

Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Buckhorn Café on the outskirts of Buckhorn State Park, then we drove up to Black River Falls and stopped at the colorful café we had gone to the year before for some good coffee. We hiked at Castle Mound State Natural Area, and as always, I charged confidently up the rocks but then was a quivering mass of terror trying to get back down, so some people coming up offered me a walking stick. Surprisingly, that did help my fear a lot, just having a third point of support. Travalon went all the way up the observation tower, which I never could have gotten back down from. They would have had to send a helicopter or something. After that we cooled off in Wazee Lake, floating on our inflatable rafts out to a little island we had seen there last year, when we visited on a day too cool for swimming. We walked on the island and waded around it, then we drove to Mill Bluff State Park and Travalon floated on the pond, but he said it was very cold. I was too lazy to change back into my swimsuit and just watched him floating and a train speeding by on the other side of Highway 12. When we got back to Castle Rock Lake, Travalon floated on that too. By then it was kind of late, so instead of going all the way to the other side of the lake to a supper club, we just went to a pizza place down the road. In Mauston we had picked up stuff to make s’mores and stuff to make the fire colorful, so after we successfully started a fire following the Chicagoan’s instructions, we made s’mores and THEN (very important!) threw the color packets into the fire so that it had turquoise flames. Travalon made a really good video of it, but my phone didn’t show the contrast between the orange and the turquoise flames – it just made the whole fire look kind of whitish. As we enjoyed the colorful fire, we smoked the cigar we had brought back from Cuba, and it was wonderful.

Yesterday we got coffee in Mauston, then we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant in New Lisbon before embarking on a real adventure. I had told Travalon tales of canoeing on the Kickapoo River years ago, and he wanted to try it, but things are different now. I’m not in my twenties, and the river flooded last year and is wilder now. In fact, it used to always be packed with people, but yesterday we saw hardly anyone else on it. We both fell out of the canoe at various points, and we kept getting stuck in shallow water. I have a bruise on my hand and a huge bruise on my calf, I wrenched my back when my paddle got stuck in some tree roots, and (Travalon said this is so funny I should blog about it, but it’s disgusting) when I started the canoe trip, I was wearing a female hygiene pad, but by the time I changed out of my wet clothes at Wildcat Mountain State Park, it had vanished. I feel very bad about that, thinking of someone finding it in the river, but that gives you an idea of how much I got tossed around! I could barely make the short walk to the Wildcat Mountain observation area, or the short hike to the ice caves. We drove on beautiful Highway 33 by all sorts of rock formations to Reedsburg, hoping to have a wonderful cream ale at the Corner Pub, but it was closed. We did have a delicious dinner of Rtiz-encrusted walleye at Marty’s Steakhouse at the Voyageur hotel/convention center. At first we were the only ones in the restaurant, and the creepiness factor was enhanced by five different clocks suddenly ringing in the hour in different ways, but soon more people arrived. After that we just went home, and I iced my bruised calf and tried to stretch out my back.

Today besides the usual back-to-work blahs, I was in rough shape this morning. My back hurt so badly that I could barely get out of bed, my leg hurt so badly that I could barely walk, and weirdly my fingers were so swollen on my right hand that I couldn’t wear any rings. (My left hand, which is not bruised, did not have that problem, so I could wear my wedding band and engagement ring.) But as the day has gone on, I have been able to pop my back several times so it feels a lot better, and the bruise on my leg is getting better too. Still, I don’t remember ever feeling like this after a canoe trip back in the day!

Famous Hat