Green Lake and Horicon and a Samba Dance Lesson

 

Yesterday Travalon and I had to run an errand, then we drove to Columbus and had lunch at Julie's Cafe. Please tell me I'm not the only one who thought it was a capital A instead of "fi"!

Then we watched the Amtrak Empire Builder arrive. Blogspot is not letting me load this relatively short video, so I'll have to put it on YouTube and share the link at some future point.

Our next stop was Guth's in Waupun, where we got their famous peanut butter cups and also Guth O'Leary.

Does he glow under blacklight? You know he does.

Travalon said his last name should be O'Leary because he's the same color as my lion Hannibal O'Leary from the Mardi Gras parade in Mobile, and then Guth because we got him at Guth's. (It rhymes with tooth.) Then we drove to Green Lake, which was a place Anna Banana II had thought of visiting on her trip to our fair state. We found out too late that there are boat rides, so we'll have to do that another time. We just walked around a little park downtown and saw all sorts of fun things, like a great blue heron.

And a bridge over the creek.

Here is the heron looking at you.

There were some very colorful instruments in the park.

Here I am attempting to play "Scarborough Fair." I finally found a key it worked in (since it's in the Dorian mode)... but then the notes didn't go quite low enough.

We walked across the street to another park and saw these dark purple clematis.

True story: years ago I worked at a nursery/plant store, and someone called asking if we carried "chlamydia seeds." At least we knew what that person wanted - there was a person who came in looking for hosta lilies who did such a bad job describing them that it took us forever to figure out what they wanted. 

Oops, out of order - here's a zoomed-out shot of the heron.

And here are a couple photos of Green Lake:

We drove down the road and saw an egret in a marsh, so we pulled over. The egret had disappeared, but we saw another great blue heron and this bald eagle.

Here is Guth O'Leary admiring himself in the rearview mirror on our drive back to Waupun.

We tried to find an Artesian well in the town of Brandon that Travalon remembered from years ago, but it is apparently not functioning anymore, so we were going to get more water in Waupun. However, we got distracted by a brewpub that his buddy's daughter had recommended, so we went there and ended up trying some sour beers, and I had an infused lavender drink, and we even ended up getting a flatbread. There was a beautiful room full of plants that we amazingly had to ourselves.

Then we drove to Horicon Marsh and went on the auto tour and on Old Marsh Road, which is only open June through August. Of course Blogspot loaded these in reverse order so here's the beautiful sunset we saw.

We saw egrets and swans, so two of the four Big White Birds.

We saw the red-headed ducks again.

And the cormorant rookery along Highway 49.

This is a male blue-winged teal.

And this is a female hooded merganser with babies.

Speaking of babies, this is what we had to contend with on the auto tour... and on Old Marsh Road.

It was much better when they were in the water instead of right in our way.

We also saw several pairs of swans, but not always in the best location to photograph.

Here is a female mallard with babies.

Another egret.

A male mallard.

We saw both black and white terns.

This was the first thing we saw when we got to Horicon Marsh - a female wood duck.

Argh! This second batch is again in reverse order! So here's the sunset.

A snapping turtle was on the path.

We saw some male wood ducks,

I think these ducks are gadwalls.

Merlin says this interesting bird is a Wilson's Phalarope.

We also saw some black-necked stilts flying around, but that photo didn't turn out.

This is a killdeer.

I believe these are more gadwalls.

And the thing I was really there to see, the yellow-headed blackbird.

This egret was posing so nicely for us.

We saw this swan along Highway 49.

One more sunset photo.

A couple more swans.

This might be a pintail duck.

The whole drive home, I could see Venus and Jupiter like two eyes in the sky. My flash went off when I took this photo.

So I turned the flash off and tried again.

Here's a photo from Travalon's good camera.

Travalon had given me a telescope for Christmas, so we tried to set it up to look at the two planets, but all we saw was a gray ball like the one in Travalon's photo. Rich said he could help tonight.

Today I brought my violin to Mass, then Travalon dropped me off at the Quadra where we have our Brazilian drumming lessons because we were all getting a lesson in how to dance samba. It was a lot of fun, but man am I not coordinated! Then afterwards there was a potluck, so Travalon came back for that, and we sat around talking with another couple - the woman grew up in my hometown! It had cooled down outside, so we all moved out there and listened to the pagode group play, and I chatted with another woman who isn't in the drumming group but knows one of the people from Hoofers, so of course she knows Pete the Sailor Man. It's a small world. It was paradise listening to gentle samba as the breezes picked up, but I eventually had to leave for the slow Irish session. The red-headed flute player was leading it today, and it went really well. We had so many people, including some Moldy Jam regulars. Then in the evening Rich came over to look at my telescope. He fixed something I had missed in the instructions, and we looked at the lighthouse belonging to the condo association nearby, since it was cloudy so we couldn't look at the planets. Hopefully soon...

Famous Hat