Great River Road Trip

The past couple days we took off on a spur-of-the-moment trip along the Great River Road of the upper Mississippi River. We usually drive some on both the Wisconsin and the Minnesota side; both are beautiful.  The weather here has been sunny and dry, and comfortable for doing almost anything.  We've been taking similar trips most of our marriage, often staying in bed and breakfast places or small inns.  I keep trying to capture the beauty of the area, and I never come close.  These shots were taken from Buena Vista Park, far above Alma.  We'd never visited this park before and were well pleased by the  scene below us, the town, railroad track with endless freight trains, and lock and dam.  In winter I've heard the town is a great place to watch bald eagles.

We stayed further north in Maiden Rock, in a restored school house, now turned bed and breakfast, called the Maiden Rock Inn.  It's off the main high a block or so, a little farther from the railroad tracks that run along the whole highway than we usually stay.  The owners saved the old brick school from demolition in the 1990s, and were happy to take us on a tour of the large building.  Our room was beautiful with high ceilings, tall windows like the ones in the two room country school I attended as a child, but with comfortable air conditioning and a jacuzzi.  This picture was taken in the hallway outside our room.  In the evening we shared wine with the owner before we headed off to the Harbor View Cafe in Pepin (a favorite place for supper).  In the morning we were treated to a late breakfast of organic chicken paprika and spaetzle. It was all very decadent.

Nearby on the River Road is the little town of Stockholm.   We always stop here for something cold to drink, and a wander through the galleries and antique shops.  These mannikin heads caught my eye this time. There's an art tour coming up in October and I am tempted to go back and tour around all the galleries and pottery places.

We drove home slowly, stopping at scenic overlooks whenever we felt like a stretch.  We took a little side trip at Cochrane to revisit a favorite folk art site called Prairie Moon.  Its several acres of cement sculptures created in the late 1950's and 1960's by a farmer and fiddler named Herman Rusch.  There's a building that apparently has photographs and more information, but we have never found it open, and in fact have never seen anyone else at the site, though it is nicely mowed and planted with flowers.

There are all sorts of constructions here - planters, a 250 foot arched fence, life sized sculptures, painted or decorated with bits of broken glass or seashells.  I like this tableau of a Norwegian pioneer battling with a brown bear.  There's a life size polar bear too, and a huge snake. All of it is kept by local volunteers and by the Kohler Foundation.

I didn't take any photo of the historic Trempealeau Hotel, when we stopped for a late lunch, but that is another favorite place for us, nothing fancy, but always with friendly service and excellent food along the Mississippi River.  We sat and watched a grain barge while we ate.

Our last stop was at Peck's farm market outside of Spring Green.  I wanted some early Macintosh apples for eating and baking, and I am a sucker for the animals they have for the kids.  The lady who checked us out modeled her new weiner hat for us, and I am sharing the photo with her permission.  Too fun!

We're back home again, and while it was very pleasant to revisit the river, it's good to be back. 

Then and Now - Rock River Thresheree

Vintage tractor at the 2011 thresheree

Earl Pierce on his Farmall tractor, 1920's

I've lived in Rock County since I started teaching in 1973, but I had never gotten myself out to the Rock River Thresheree.  Part of the problem is that I am always more compelled to go to the Walworth County Fair, which is held at the same time, and is much more familiar.  But this year my dear husband expressed a wish to see all the old tractors and farm equipment so we decided that Saturday was the day.  Although showers were forecast for the afternoon, our thought was that we'd browse around a couple hours, get some brats for lunch and then head home before rain turned the place into a giant mud volleyball pit.

God laughs at our plans.

We drove out at around 9 AM, parked easily in a big field of cut alfalfa, rode the tractor powered shuttle wagon to the grounds and were enchanted by the rows and rows of old tractors.  I had rolled my eyes before at mature men fascinated by vintage equipment, but was unprepared for the visceral reaction I had when I saw a perfectly restored little 1950 Ford tractor, gray, with red trim.  This piece of equipment  was more evocative of my childhood than either old Barbies or the smell of baked bread.  I was transported by the shifting lever, the foot pedals, the metal seat.  I could just imagine my father, me standing next to him, hanging on the fenders.  I experienced some serious nostalgia, so much so that some elderly farmer came up to chat.  That little Ford was the first vehicle I ever drove by myself.  My reaction to the midsize red International Harvester was similar, though for some reason the John Deere tractors I saw while the skies were still clear didn't move me as much.  We see more of them around, perhaps. Dick was feeling it too; he made a point of showing me the tractor his dad owned when they lived in Greenfield, with a similar look on his face.

Dad, plowing out our quarter mile driveway, about 1951

The event features lots more than tractors.  There's all sorts of old equipment, much of it steam powered.  There are old mills of various sorts, pile drivers, threshing equipment.  There is a Civil War Encampment.  People demonstrate all sorts of things, woodcarving, blacksmithing.  Not that we saw all of it, because a half hour after we arrived,  it started to sprinkle.  We shrugged our shoulders and looked inside the log cabin, the saw mill, the pole barns with giant generators.  The rain increased.  We still thought it would let up, so we lit into a couple Johnsonville brats with a helping of kraut.  Still the gray skies wept.  We rode the narrow gage railroad around the park, stalling for time.  More rain.

Grandpa, with some sort of harvesting equipment in the 1920's

So I dragged my dear husband to the place where volunteers were grinding corn and buckwheat, since I had a yen for buckwheat pancakes.  The inside of the barn was plastered with old seed company signs - from the days when there were many local hybrid seed companies.  Our farm raised hybrid seed for Simons for years, though the small family business was swallowed up years ago. It continued to rain.

Grandpa Pierce with Sicy Simons, maybe 1930.

So we decided to get back to our car and get out while we still could.  Trouble was, we waited too long.  Neither of us wore raincoats or carried an umbrella, so soon we were soaked through to the skin.  The temperature started dropping and I was getting pretty darned cold, but the worst was still ahead.

I should have known we were in for trouble when the smaller tractors quit shuttling people out to the field because they were getting stuck.  After twenty or so minutes of rocking, spinning up mud, and trying to push our car up rises slick with wet mud and clay we admitted defeat and caught another shuttle back to the park where we threw ourselves on the mercy of a friend parked in a better place.  We left our car where it was, rode home with our friend, and worried about it all evening.

Today was dry, breezy and sunny, the perfect thing for drying out mud.  The organizers of the thresheree started a shuttle from Milton High School, so we took that back to the park today, and drove out with no problems.

I'll have to check out the Parade of Power and flea market some other year, preferably a nice dry day.

Back to the Fair

The Walworth County Fair is back in full swing.  I took myself on Wednesday, before it was too terribly hot, as it turned out to be on Thursday.  Almost none of the original reasons I loved the fair as a child have any relevance to my adult self.  As a kid I loved going to the fair because there were crowds of people, and I knew most of them.  I could wander through any barn and find several 4-H friends, or kids I knew from school.  I could mooch a quarter off my grandfather, who reigned over one busy corner in a seed-corn tent with sample stalks tied up along one wall.  I could ride the Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, or swings until vertigo compelled me to flop on a bench.  I always had 4-H projects to watch during judging (the small cash premiums were nice) , or at least once a style show in which to participate.  I ate a fair amount of Malone's salt water taffy in my day too.

But times change, and the fair has come to mean something different.  It looks pretty much the same, with old white clapboard buildings housing the fair office, the cream puff stand and the Methodist dining hall.  Some of the old wooden building are gone, replaced by metal pole buildings. The old wooden horse barns burned years ago, as did the grandstand, though the latter was rebuilt in a probably safer way.  The smell is the same too, a bit of fried food, some grilled sweetcorn and barbequed pork, a bit of dust (or some years mud), of cattle and swine, of sweaty people.  But I seldom see anyone I know.  Maybe they are there, but I just don't recognize them, disguised as well all have become, by years.  I like walking through midway, watching the excited kids lined up for rides, the bored looking carnies slumped at controls or double checking harnesses.  I don't ride any more; I just take photos, hoping to some day use them as a reference for painting.  Carnies don't like being photographed.  Any time I ask they turn me down, so sometimes I just snap quickly and hope to capture them leaning amongst their giant stuffed toys and bowls filled with goldfish.  The man who ran the camel ride concession confided to me that some of the carnies have run afoul of the law and don't want their pictured published anywhere.  They're safe with me - no one will ever recognize them from my paintings.

This year I bought my fresh cream puff from the nice men wearing paper hats and aprons at the Knights of Columbus stand, and did a reasonable job of eating it without getting powered sugar all over myself. I snapped pictures of the camels, the little racing piggies, kids on rides, and wary chickens in the small animal barn.  Then I was hot, footsore, and maybe a little lonesome for my grandfather, long dead, and my old friends, unseen, so I walked back downtown to my parked car and headed back home.