Weekend in Wisconsin......Better Than I Could Possibly Expect!

Hello all! Yes, I missed you too. That's ok. Absence makes the heart grow fonder at OUR stage of our relationship (as writer and reader). While I had no computer access, I still did think about things that I would write and pictures I would take to show you all.

The trip actually started with a little stress as there was a lot of snow and ice up in Merrimac, WI over the last few weeks. As it turns out, the "driveway" to Ricardo's cottage house (which is about 75 yards long or so) had 6-8" of snow on top of an inch of ice which covered a few more inches of snow. This was going to be impossible for me to traverse in my Camry. Fortunately, his very help neighbors, Dick and Mary, know a guy (Len) who, though being 85, is still out clearing driveways. Best $100 I ever spent! I didn't reach Len until Thursday morning, but he was on it first thing on Friday. Whew! When I arrived at the entranceway and started heading down the driveway, it was like being in a bobsled.....or at least how I would imagine a bobsled being....where as long as you have locomotion, you're going to end up at the bottom of the driveway because there was no moving left or right. Pretty cool actually.

So now the weekend in pictures! I'll throw in a story or two as well.







This is what we left for Ricardo for allowing us to use his cottage for the weekend! Thanks Ricardo! I'll tell you where we hid it so "other" people don't get it first.
















Yeah, the picture is dark, but you can see MWrigley in the corner chilling on Friday late afternoon if you blow it up. This is the main living room of the cottage.









Yep, that's me in my "wood gettin' " outfit. The main fireplace is right behind me in this pic. There are two other wood burning stoves in the cottage and I had all three going on Friday. By Saturday I was already down to just the main fireplace as it was really the only one that impacted our temperature much.










Here is dinner on Friday night. Mmmmm. It was a garlic and herb, tri-tip roast (I think that's right at least) and veggies. Very tasty. It looks like we had my favorite wine as well, a sweet Hungarian wine. MWrigley had brought all the ingredients for our dinners and lunches and I took care of breakfast. The food was great all weekend!





For entertainment we played Trivial Pursuit, The SNL Edition with DVD questions. Very fun, but we both struggled to come up with the names of characters and products on the show.

The other activity was puzzling! We had a 750 piece puzzle of a box of chocolates to put together. It took us until about 2 a.m. on Monday morning to actually get it done! I'm not particularly good at puzzles, but I started off strong. In the beginning, it was 65-35 as far as putting pieces together in favor of MWrigley. After a bit I faded and she did most of the work, maybe 85-15. Then I came on strong at the end again with some good contributions, maybe 70-30. MWrigley is a little OCD with that kind of thing, so she was all over getting the puzzle done. This picture is the puzzle mostly disheveled.







The finished puzzle!!










But we didn't stay in all day. On Saturday we went hiking, more about that later. On Monday, we decided to go snow shoeing before packing up and heading home. Here's MWrigley out on the trail doing her best Suzy Chapstick.










So on Saturday we decided to go for a little walk into the woods after seeing Dick and Mary (the neighbors). One neat aspect of the land around the cottage is that a river runs through it and there's actually a cool water fall. So I was taking MWrigley to what I believe is the highest point on the property where there was a nice view of the falls. While up there, I thought it might be fun to slide down the snow and ice to the bottom of the steep hill we were on. So I went down and MWrigley followed. It was indeed fun, however, we found ourselves at the bottom of a very steep hill and the other side, which didn't look steep from atop the other hill, turned out to be VERY steep as well.....especially when covered with 6+" of light, fluffy snow on top of ice. Suddenly, this "walk" took a nasty little turn.

After much walking to find a shallower slope to ascend, we finally bit the bullet and tried to scale the hill just past the end of Ricardo's property. It was very slippery, as ice tends to be, and it was slow going. About half of the way up, I realized that if I really stepped hard with my heel, I could crack the ice beneath the snow and create a little foot hold. MWrigley could then follow my prints without a little less effort. Though we joked about nearly dieing out in Ricardo's "back yard", we both knew that while dieing wasn't an outcome, a long cold night certainly was. I'm not sure how far we would have had to walk until we found flatter, more easily traversed land. And then we would have had to walk back from there! Ugh. Still, we went snow shoeing on Monday.......guess I didn't scare her enough with my outdoors skills!






I'm not sure how this picture ended up here.....or am I??