The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part three

This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

Sunday, August 24

 I forgot to mention that after dinner at the River's Edge, we had ice cream at a place called Avazza (maybe), which was right next to a restaurant & bar called the Lake House, which had live music out back on their dance floor at the water's edge, so we could also hear it. (They may be owned by the same people.) And we went back to the condo and played Password with a game set the Nancy and Sherry had borrowed from the office while I was doing laundry. 

 Today began with a Premier League match on TV, with Everton christening their new stadium by beating Brighton and Hove Albion 3:0, and then the start of the Fulham:Man U match until everyone was ready to go. We drove up to a village called Warrens, which is the center of the Wisconsin cranberry industry. We got to the Discover Cranberries Cafe just in time to be almost their final customers ever: today is their last day in business, unless they can find a new space to relocate into. The menu looked like a Department of Justice document detailing President Trump's dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, all redacted to reflect the fact that there was just about nothing left to serve. I got a cheeseburger (no lettuce, no tomato, no pickle, no onion); others got variations on grilled cheese sandwiches. They also had a small selection of t-shirts and hoodies for sale at 80% off; Sherry got a short-sleeve t-shirt, a long-sleeve t-shirt, and a hoodie for about $15 total. I got three amusing wall signs for about a dollar each: "We're more than a family; we're like a small gang"; "I think my gene pool was one of those above-ground things"; and "Leftovers are for quitters."

Sand to be spread on the bogs

 In the basement of the cafe building is the Cranberry Museum, which was interesting enough for us to spend better than an hour in, seeing the history of cranberry farming in the area. We were down there long enough that they thought they could close, and turned the lights out on us. And then we took a self-guided tour around the cranberry bogs before we headed back to the Dells (after a stop at a Yarn Shop in Warrens, which involved long discussions of Sherry's wardrobe, all of which is knitted or crocheted, and of the recent floods in Texas, which were of surprising interest to the Wisconsin locals, as were earthquakes in South Texas; go figure).  

cranberry bogs provide habitat for sandhill cranes

 I have to say that, after two days, I'm not very impressed with the elaborate electronics on the Yukon. I mean, besides having so many buttons of unknown function with indecipherable heiroglyphics on them, the ones we have figured out don't seem to work. I have my phone paired to the car. It will start up, then quit, then start up, then quit, and so on. I had a couple of podcasts downloaded for our trip today, and that aspect of it seemed to work alright, but the GPS got us to within 20 miles of our destination, then stopped working entirely. It never came back up the rest of the way to Warrens, and never came up at all on the return trip; although the GPS on the phone (and on Sherry's phone, and on Nancy's phone) worked perfectly well. The car's GPS is still lost out there, looking for the intersection of Main Street and Oakdale Road. Very frustrating, and completely useless if you're relying on it to get you where you're going. (It got lost again on the way home from dinner. It's not my phone; it's the car.)

 Back at the condo, we made a general plan for the rest of our week here, trying to fit in a number of competing activities. Then we went to dinner at a sort of sports tavern/restaurant; good, but unremarkable. 

 

Monday, August 25

 I went to breakfast by myself, as Nancy and Sherry always have oatmeal together and Jeff doesn't get up until late, and has some frozen stuff like Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches that he likes but I don't. I went to a place in Lake Delton (the town we're actually in, south of the town of Wisconsin Dells) called BJ's Restaurant, based just on the musings of reviewers on Google Maps. It was rated at 4.3 stars, but there is, I've learned, a huge difference between 4.3 stars and 4.5 stars. The food was just so-so: a quesadilla filled with small chunks of steak and cheese and vaguely Mexican-themed veggies, along with undercooked hashbrowns from a freezer bag. The sour cream and salsa made the quesadilla bearable. At least the coffee and service were pretty good. 

sculpture of a crane taking off

 I was back in time for our 9AM departure to the International Crane Foundation facility a few miles south, toward Baraboo. It proved pretty interesting, though I wasn't thrilled with the docent-intern who guided us around a few of the exhibits. She seemed to have memorized her presentation, and every time she was asked a question she seemed to be doing a term search in her mind. It was kind of like being guided by AI. The theme of her tour was "cranes in myth and legend", which is probably why only three of the fifteen species of cranes were part of the tour.

whooping cranes

 They have all fifteen species of cranes in the world on display, and thousands more specimens out of public sight at a complex they call Crane City. That's where they do their breeding programs aimed at preserving each species. Sandhill cranes, one of two North American species, are the only type of crane not in some danger of extinction, and that is a success story in itself, given that at one point only a few decades ago that species came close to disappearing. Now there are about a million of them, and their habitats seem fairly secure. 

 Whooping cranes are the closest to extinction, but their numbers have increased slowly from 21 birds to almost 900, and this organization claims a large part of the credit for that. Most of Crane City is given over to breeding whooping cranes.

on the Duck Boat

 After the crane foundation, we went for lunch at a local winery. I got a small pizza and took half of it back to the condo. We also got a cheese plate that attracted a variety of bees, wasps and flies. Jeff, who may be allergic, got his lip stung when he bit into a piece of food on which a bee or wasp was dining, and ended up going back to the condo while the rest of us rode the Duck Boat in the Dells. (It might've been the wine, too: he had a flight all to himself, while Sherry and Nancy split one; I drank water. Pardon me a moment while I polish my halo.) (Jeff survived and his lip, which was swollen, is back to normal.)

 I wanted to ask the boat driver "Jack" if he wrote his own material -- the now-standard collection of puns and bad jokes -- but I thought it'd be like one of those queries where you come to an intersection with two people, one who always tells lies and one who always tells the truth. I didn't want to work through that.

 I had some leftover pizza for dinner and we all went out to see the Rick Wilcox Magic Show in the Dells. It was a theater that held maybe 200 people, almost full, and Wilcox put on a very enjoyable comedy-magic show. He started off with what I'd call "traditional" magic tricks, where doves and things appear and disappear. I know I've seen these tricks a hundred times in my life, but I still don't understand how they can work. I mean, I'm sitting five rows back, dead center, and I see the handkerchief waving and he runs his hand down its length and there's nothing in it, then suddenly he's holding a live bird and no handkerchief!. It's still such an amazing thing. 

The whole show is like that: amazing. A little corny, sure, because it's very family-oriented, but it's even more amazing when you see it live than it is on television. These things just seem to be impossible, even though you know there's some sleight-of-hand and that Penn and Teller have probably explained it all before. Definitely a show to go back to if we ever come to the Dells again. 

 We followed up the show with a dose of ice cream at Huckleberry's in the Dells' downtown area, which had kind of a 1950s-Las-Vegas-without-the-casinos feel to it. I just went with mint chocolate chip because none of the "local" flavours grabbed my imagination. It was still good. And there were lots of people out wandering around in the area, which also hosted a down-home mix of tourist spots (fudge! boba tea! souvenirs!) and local attractions (bar! restaurant! bar! bar! tavern! bar!). It felt like a nice place.

 I've realized that my GPS works perfectly well in this beast of a vehicle if I don't used the Android Auto program. The phone is paired to the car, and the audio comes through clearly, but the map doesn't show on the giant screen. Luckily I have the map on the phone, which I can see if I look down, but I don't need to because the heads-up display shows upcoming turns and distances. If I use Android Auto, it gets lost and freezes up, but without that it works well enough. I've figured out a couple of the thirty-two thousand buttons, too, and don't really much care about the rest. Although it might've been nice to know how to make the beast parallel-park itself, I wasn't about to experiment with that on a busy street.