Back on the Bearskin Trail

Today Travalon and I drove north to Minocqua, to do some of the things we hadn't had time for on our last trip. We stopped at Stevens Point again to go to the antiques mall downtown, and I bought some low-priced rosaries from the booth that had the interesting stuff last time, like the St. Anne chaplet. One thing was called a "rosary bracelet," but it had a very large crucifix on it, so I thought that seemed strange. It was in a little plastic bag, so once I was out of the shop, I opened it up and looked at it. It has beautiful sapphire blue glass beads, and it looks like it was at one time a regular-sized rosary that would have been worth some money, but it only had seven beads of the first decade and eight of the last one. So I linked the two broken parts together and created a chaplet with fifteen beads, but there isn't a chaplet I could find online with that configuration, so I just used it to pray fifteen Hail Marys. Here is a picture of it, along with the other rosaries I bought, and a tiny stuffed narwhal from a rest stop.

Our next stop was the Nine Mile Forest wilderness area outside of Wausau, which had some beautiful trails, but we realized they were for mountain bikers so we were taking our lives into our hands by hiking on them. Then we drove to a dot on the map called Rantz, which seems to consist of a parking lot for the Bearskin Trail, and we walked a couple of miles north on the trail, to the spot we had gotten to when walking south from Minocqua. We saw some baby pine trees and a mother deer and fawn along the way.

The trail looked on the map like it went right by Bolger Lake, but we couldn't see it, so we drove on Bolger Lake Road to the public boat landing. Here are some pictures, including a fox we saw on our way.

Fortunately there is a Mexican restaurant right next to our hotel, so we just walked over for dinner, and then Travalon went back for a margarita and a daiquiri while I talked to Tiffy. Tomorrow we are planning to go to the south side of the Turtle Flambeau Flowage, if the weather isn't too bad. Right now there is a thunderstorm, and more are forecast for tomorrow. Stay tuned...

Famous Hat