The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part four

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.

 

Tuesday, August 26

  After polishing off the last of my pizza for breakfast -- always a good start to any day -- we headed up to the Dells for the Boat Tour, hosted by Captain Abby and Emma the Award-Winning Guide, who shares a writer with Jack from the Duck Boats. In fact, she told many of the same jokes, eliciting all the same groans. But she also told some different dad-jokes, and some different puns. But both of them made a fuss about Sherry's and Nancy's crocheted hats, so we like them. And of the two tours, I clearly prefer the Boat Tour, as the time spent bumping around on land in a poorly-sprung vehicle behind a loud smoking diesel had nothing to recommend it, whereas at least the smoothness of the water passage was relaxing, even with the noise of the boat's powerful engine. 

The clear water in Witch's Gulch

 

Stand Rock

 The boat tour stops at two locations in the river, both of which I remember fairly clearly from my previous visit here in 2012, with Kirby: Witch's Gulch, and Stand Rock. The first is a spot where you can walk up a narrow defile to a concession stand near the road that passes through the state park. Then the boat goes just across the water (it's a lake or reservoir, held back by the hydroelectric dam next to downtown Wisconsin Dells, and 17 feet above where it would normally be, but the locals insist on calling it a river, as though it had a natural flow to it) to Stand Rock, a pair of adjacent pillars of sandstone where, in the 1800s, local photographer H.H. Bennett took a famous photograph of his son leaping between the two pillars. It was one of the shots that made the Dells a popular tourist destination back then. Nowadays, though, what with insurance costs, they let a dog make the jump. They employ three, just for that purpose.

 By the end of that tour it was time for lunch, so we repaired to the River's Edge Pub, where we had been for dinner earlier. We hadn't planned that, but it was there and we had started wandering in circles a little bit, looking for inspiration. I had a so-so fish sandwich; I didn't make a note of what anyone else had. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad, so it was good enough. And it was there.

Apollo & Slim

 "There," in this instance, means it was just at the end of the road we took to get the Lost Canyon wagon tour. The Lost Canyon is a very narrow crack-in-the-mountain type place where horses pull wagons of up to 14 tourists through the rock's channel. In our case the horses were Slim and Apollo. Slim is a Clydesdale with a mustache worthy of Hercule Poirot; Apollo is a larger American Paint Drafthorse, one with a butt worthy of a Kardashian. (I'm guessing; I don't actually know what a Kardashian looks like, but I picture them all as having huge asses.) 

 After a couple of rearrangements of personnel on the wagon, Sherry and I got to sit up front with the driver, so we had the best view of the tour. There are lots of places where you think there's no way this wagon is going to fit through the crevice ahead, but it opens up just enough as you round the last curve. 

Oncoming traffic

 There's one point where the narrow passage is long enough that you have to be concerned about unseen wagons coming in the other direction. They have a signal light arrangement there, and as it happens we encountered another tour group at that point. 

 I think that of the organized group activities we've been in on this trip, the Lost Canyon tour is my favourite, even though it's fairly short, only about half an hour, and a little bit bumpy; and my preference, it turns out, is unrelated to the cost, which seemed more modest than either the Ducks or Dells tours, but were in the same cost-neighbourhood. The Lost Canyon was just very relaxing and the scenery, seen up close (extremely; I was afraid of hitting my head more than once, and I'm sure Slim's ear brushed the underside of the rocks a few times) was captivating.

Champions all

 Following that, we had to make a choice: miniature golf, or cheese-ball croquet? Jeff pointed out the danger of getting your jaw smashed by a mallet just as you go to bite into your cheese ball, so we opted for mini-golf at a place called Pirate's Cove, which has like seven separate courses. The one on top of its hill is billed as "almost completely accessible," so we picked that one. There were two holes that required climbing half a dozen stairs to get to, which Jeff could have negotiated easily enough by leaving his rolling walker at the bottom, but in the event it wasn't necessary, as he was on a bathroom-break at that point and skipped half a dozen holes, including those two. So he technically Did Not Finish, while the rest of us came in in a fairly tight cluster of scores. I won, with even a hole-in-one, which may have never happened before. 

 We celebrated completion of the Once-A-Year Athletic Club Members' Meeting with drinks and light snacks on the back deck of the Lake House, where we'd heard the fiddler a couple of days earlier: cheese curds (not great), artichoke dip with pita bread (I didn't try it), and soup for two, plus a shrimp salad for Jeff. Nancy and I tried a strawberry-purée mocktail, while the others opted for actual booze, the lushes. The setting was very nice, the conversation was relaxed and as laid-back as the service. We ended the evening at the condo, where there are surprisingly few stars visible despite it seeming very dark out. Stayed up late just talking about this and that.

 

Wednesday, August 27

 Since we were up so late on Tuesday, we were late out of the gate on Wednesday. I, for one, felt tired all day, and I know Jeff did too, but we all seemed to have a good time regardless. Condo week is always like that. I did breakfast at a little local cafe called Denny's Diner (no relation to the chain of lousy restaurants), where I had a couple of fried eggs, a bagel and a schmeer served to me by, I'm guessing, a couple of Romanian kids. (They seem to be everywhere here, all on summer work visas.) It was good, but somehow I expected more, I don't know, charm? As I was driving back to the condo in that embarrassing truck, I got to thinking about how many middle-class families could live in this condo development, with its roughly 175 one- and two-bedroom units and lots of room to build more. This would make a significant dent in the affordability crisis in most major cities if it could be duplicated on a cost-effective basis; but resort rentals bring a higher return, so investment goes to that instead of what people really need. 

All aboard! R&GN Railway

 Back at the condo, we had a long, leisurely discussion of the day's activities, and then set off first to ride the miniature train at the Riverside & Great Northern. This was originally a factory where miniature trains were built, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Now it's a volunteer organization of people who like these 15-inch-gauge trains. They have a three-mile ride through the woods to a turntable where the engine is moved to the other end of the train, and you head back on the same line. We sat in a cattle car which had four seats, each facing in a different direction. Other than the difficulty of getting into the car, and the bumpiness of the ride (not unexpected), it was a pleasant journey, even fun. The car could probably have accommodated more than just the four of us, but fortunately we were the entire complement. 

view from the Riverwalk

 After that we went downtown and walked around some, first on the Riverwalk -- a pretty walkway built along the cliffs overlooking the river for about a quarter of a mile -- then on Broadway, checking out all the schlocky tourist places along there. T-shirt shops, fudge shops, ice-cream parlours, and bars seem the dominant elements of the mix, but anything that might soak up a few tourist dollars finds a place along the street. It's fun to see. I was actually hoping to find a reasonably-priced long-sleeve all-cotton T-shirt or sweatshirt, but after stopping in a few of the stores I gave up. Surprisingly, it wasn't price that kept me from buying anything.

 We interrupted our Broadway Schlep with a couple of errands (post office and drugstore), then returned to see the Root Beer Museum. Nancy got a flight of root beers that we all tasted before selecting one to use in root beer floats while she debated charging us for the samples we'd had ... by which point it was really too late and we just refused to pay her. The floats were delicious, of course, and the museum was quirky and entertaining, a good way to pass the best part of an hour. The guy operating the place -- remarkably, not the owner -- was unbelievably enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject. 

 We were pretty drained from a week of activity after that, so we went to a local park, parked by the side of the road, and tried to nap for about an hour. I don't think I managed to sleep at all; not sure if Jeff did; Nancy and Sherry sat contentedly in the back seat, knitting. (They do that everywhere. I'm sure if you google "women knitting in Wisconsin Dells" you'll see random people's vacay Tik Tok videos.) When the clock at the nearby church chimed six o'clock, we fired up our oversized truck and meandered down the road to the Legacy Dinner Theater, where we had tickets for Sneaky Pete's Wild West Show, a local production written by the theater owner featuring an all-you-can-eat meal of carbohydrates and fried food: a cream vegetable soup that seemed to be pure cream; dinner rolls; a pewter bucket of almost-cold fried chicken, which fortunately was not also greasy (it wasn't really bad except that it should have been warmer), and all the basic forms of foods my doctor has told me to steer clear of: mashed potatoes (which felt like they were made from flakes), corn on the cob (which I managed to avoid entirely), macaroni and (soi-disant) cheese, and baked beans (which were actually pretty tasty). Dessert choices were a fudge brownie or an apple turnover. I had the turnover, which wasn't bad, while everyone else had the brownie, which wasn't particularly good by brownie standards, which are high. Bad as the food was, I still ate too much of it, and felt bloated and ill the rest of the night. (The kind of feeling where I wake up, remember my heart attacks, and wonder if this is the Big One.)

  And then came the show. We were seated at a "bad guy" table, so we were supposed to boo the hero and cheer the villain. I did neither; I'm sorry, but this show struck me from overture to closing credits as a heavy-handed commercial for all the largest local tourist traps, but geared for second graders; and I assume all those tourist traps mentioned in the show were the ones willing to pay a promotional fee to the writers of the show. It really brought home the crass commercial aspect of this resort town, and in a most unpleasant way that I'm sure my table-mates didn't note or care about, as they were fairly uniform in their mild praise of the evening's entertainment. It was, I will admit, not as bad as the usual local production (probably at least in part because the local high school has a strong performing arts program, including a Performing Arts Center that dwarfs the rest of the the school's buildings). The performers could carry a tune for the most part (though the star of the show seemed to be just the slightest bit off on a lot of her higher notes) and the musicians were more than competent. The music consisted of re-worked familiar tunes with the words changed to tell a ridiculous local story of how the town came to be called Wisconsin Dells instead of Kilbourn, the former name (until 1931). I did not enjoy the evening. I am tired of "family-oriented" entertainment, for which read kiddie shows. I am ready for some adult themes in my show selections.

 I slept very poorly Wednesday night. 

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. 

The 2025 Condo Trip, part two

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.

Thursday, August 21

 I used Rewards points for our stay in Austin, Minnesota at the AmericInn, a Wyndham brand that I'd never heard of. At a guess, I'd say maybe they started this chain of slightly-nicer motels to try to recover some of the reputational damage they've suffered from their cheapening of several of their other brands over the last dozen years or so; like La Quinta and Days Inn, both of which used to be reliably nice two- or three-star motels, but now are all over the map and are not reliably anything. I could be wrong: like I said, I've never heard of this AmericInn brand before, and this might be the chain's only decent example.

 As it is, it was clean and comfortable, and the desk clerk was particularly pleasant. 

 We went to breakfast at a little cafe across the street from the Hormel plant, where local farmer-types at the next table talked weather the entire time we were there. I learned that Spring Valley, Wisconsin, where my friend Kirby lived, had some kind of heavy-weather event. "Did you hear about Spring Valley?" said one to the others; "That was some kind of rain they had!" I wanted to ask him more about it, but didn't want them to know I'd been eavesdropping.

Admit it: you always wondered

 Then we went to the Spam Museum, on the town's main street. I think we spent close to two hours in there, learning all about the product's success around the world. I knew the stuff was popular in Hawaii: I didn't know it was popular in Asia and Europe. I bought cans of two of their best selling flavours (out of a choice of about 135); a couple of days later, at the condo, I fried up a batch of Tocino flavour Spam for breakfast -- the word means "bacon" in Spanish but it just tastes to me like Spam with sugar on it; Nancy thought it tasted of maple syrup. The other one, a Korean flavour I can't pronounce, will probably get cooked up in a day or two.

 Next came a stop in Decorah, Iowa, at Vesterheim, a Norwegian heritage museum. It takes up most of a city block and includes a four-story museum, a number of old buildings brought on site from other places, and a gift shop and gallery. It told the usual story of immigration to this country: the hardship and lack of opportunity in the Old Country; the success of most immigrants; how some went back, either because they'd saved enough money for the life they wanted back home, or because they'd been disillusioned by the hard life they found here. The Vesterheim ("western home") Foundation has been at this business of preserving and celebrating Norwegian heritage for a long time now, apparently very successfully, but maybe too successfully. To my mind, their heritage center was too clean-cut and packaged; not as down-to-earth as the Norsekedalen heritage center I'd been through a number of years ago, not far away in Wisconsin. (Though that view might only reflect the fact that a friend of mine was our docent at Norskedalen, so we got a lot more gossip on that visit.)

 I think we skipped lunch that day. I don't remember stopping for anything to eat, but we did go for ice cream at a little shop down the street from the heritage center, and a little local shop that had all kinds of interesting flavours unfamiliar to me. Sherry had a scoop of Zanzibar chocolate and one of Hunka Hunka Chunka, which had banana and peanut butter and something else in it. I had one of salted caramel with chocolate chunks, and one of a butterscotch and peanut butter mix. They were all really good.

 We had no idea how far we'd get on the road toward Milwaukee, so I didn't make a motel reservation at that time. We drove across the Mississippi River into Wisconsin, and down to the Wisconsin River, then took a designated Scenic Drive east along that river. (It was, of course, a beautiful drive.) I finally decided we would get to Sauk City, so when I had a signal I tried to make a reservation there. Couldn't find any motels in that town, so reserved a room in a place called Lodi, some ten or fifteen miles east of that. It was a little hunters' lodge, very basic and very inexpensive, with no amenities to speak of. It also had no wifi signal and no phone service, so I couldn't update this blog or deal with the pressing issue of prescriptions until the next day. We found a late dinner at a local tavern where a volleyball tournament was going on -- all of Lodi was there -- then retired for the night. 

  

Friday, August 22

 We couldn't get a signal for Google Maps in the morning on leaving Lodi, so I just had to kind of guess which way to go. My paper map didn't show any of the local roads, but I took a wild guess and headed east on a county road. It wasn't a bad guess. It got us, eventually, to the freeway, although probably 10 or 12 miles further back than a better guess would have done. No matter. It was a pretty drive

 We stopped for breakfast at a place called the Pine Cone Restaurant and Bakery, which we'd seen a billboard for. It seems to have undergone some kind of trauma, possibly relating to the road construction that blocked the main entrance; there was no bakery and the restaurant was poorly attended. The food was okay, no better: Sherry's french toast was so bland she actually added syrup to it, something I've never seen her do before; my fried egg sandwich was a little better than that, but my eggs weren't fried hard, as I'd ordered, they were scrambled. I chose not to complain. Also, my sourdough was Texas toast. I chose not to complain about that either. I was distracted at the time by the fact that, for the third time in five years, the cheap plastic register that controls the passenger-side rear window on the convertible had broken, and the window won't go up all the way. 

 I am not fixing it again. I am giving that car to the British Transportation Museum when I get back home. (I'd started to do that last year, but they didn't have their tax-exempt status in order. Now I've learned that it doesn't matter to me; we won't get any tax savings out of it anyway.) Anyway, I'm really getting too old for the kind of back-road wandering I like to do in it; and I'm just about out of new counties to go to anyway.

In Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

 So we cruised into Milwaukee, after stopping to see the pink elephant at a gas station, and the start of the Yellow Brick Road in a little town with a long Indian name. The movie, the Wizard of Oz, had had one of its premieres there in 1939. The town celebrates its moment of fame with Oz Plaza, containing the Yellow Brick Road and statues of the major cast members. 

 We're thinking of creating a travel game called Chaos Bingo, with cards showing all the things that can go wrong. What prompted this is the discovery that the minivan we reserved for our Condo Week trip was at Dane County Airport, in Madison, not Milwaukee. After several hours of frustration, at an additional cost of about $600, we finally got a big enough vehicle for all the stuff we have: a new GMC Yukon Denali, a Suburban-sized SUV that looks like a Secret Service vehicle. (Nancy: "It'll pass anything but a gas station.") We spent a long, long time trying to figure out how to get Google Maps onto the huge video screen in the car, then drove up to Tamarack Resort in Wisconsin Dells, stopping along the way for an early dinner at an Iowa-based chain of family restaurants on the model of Cracker Barrel. Good service, good food, very relaxing after all that had gone before. 

 

Saturday, August 23

 One of the first things we discovered on arriving at our condo was that the oxygen machine Nancy had gotten for Jeff (a) didn't have a long enough air tube, and (b) it didn't work right. So while we sat around waiting for the repair guy, we watched Arsenal beat the crap out of Leeds, then I did laundry in the condominium complex, and talked to my sister on the phone for an hour, which must be a new personal record. While I was talking to her, I looked up to see a moose driving by on the roof of a PT Cruiser. Turns out to be a delivery vehicle for a local pizza restaurant, but it was a surprising thing to see. Once the machine was fixed, we started planning our week in the Dells, then went to dinner at River's Edge, a nice bar and restaurant a couple of miles away. I got the big prime rib, ate half, brought the rest back to the condo and had half of the leftovers for breakfast Sunday morning. It was still a lot of food.