Fourth of July at Gibbs Lake

This morning I went for a walk with my neighbor, as usual. As we walk, we see lots of flowers.

 lilies 

 begonias

 impatiens

 clematis

 rose campion

water lilies

Actually, these wild morning glories were something I saw on the walk with Travalon at Jackson's Landing, but they're flowers, so I'm sticking them in here.

 more lilies

We also see the crane family with two teenagers, and they let us get very close, but of course I never have my good camera with me. Here you can only see one of their kids.

This morning we saw one of the adult cranes helping itself to food from someone's bird feeder. The babies are in the background off to the left.

Then I did some research on my beautiful new rosary, and it is a Golden Jubilee rosary to commemorate the 50th year of a parish called St. Stanislaus. Sadly, the parish closed in 2010. In this picture, it is the rosary on the left, then there is a fiber rosary that was in the case with it that I also got, a little one-decade wooden rosary, and the weirdly colored rosary, all from the Columbus Antiques Super-Mall. My neighbor pointed out that maybe the rosary on the right was for a member of the Red Hat Society, a group which I am quickly nearing eligibility to join, so maybe it was timely that I found it now!

Then Travalon and I convinced Richard Bonomo to come with us to Gibbs Lake. (We could not convince Kathbert.) We hiked the path along the lake and tried to find the path to the smaller lake (Little Gibbs Lake), but in fact it was not a path but a creek. There is no path to it. Then we swam in the lake while Rich napped under a tree, and we drove down a road from which you can see Little Gibbs Lake. But did I think to take a picture of either lake? Of course not. The main Gibbs Lake is very warm and very weedy.

In the evening Travalon and I decided to use a gift certificate to get dinner at Mariner's Inn, since there are no official fireworks to celebrate the Fourth this year, at least not any closer than Baraboo. I wore a Hawaiian shirt I had gotten at a Hawaiian restaurant I went to with Tiffy last year, and Travalon said I looked really good, so I asked him to take my picture. I feel like I'm channeling my paternal grandfather, who loved Hawaii.

We sat outside at Mariner's, facing a glorious sunset, and had walleye and ice cream drinks. Here is a picture of me in the light of the sunset.

And here is the sunset. Actually, this picture is from Thursday evening, but it looks very much like tonight's sunset, only even better.

Also on Thursday evening, there was a nearly full moon.

We kept hearing fireworks outside, so when it got dark enough to see something, we wandered down to our dock and watched some fireworks. It was very buggy, so Travalon suggested going to the hill with the water tower on it not too far from our house, and from there we had a wonderful view. For some reason there was no water in the fountain on the hill, which is too bad. Usually it is running and all lit up. Here is a photo of it from the summer of 2016.

Travalon calls it "the Trevi Fountain of Madison." I was just amazed by some of the fireworks we saw - they were as good as the professional ones!

Famous Hat