Category: Personal

What is a ‘dell?’  According to the dictionary:

dell |del|

noun literary

a small valley, usually among trees: lush green valleys and wooded dells.

 

As we were planning this trip, when people heard we were going to The Wisconsin Dells, they would either nod in agreement or say that it was too touristy and that we should stay away.  Both were right.  The Dells are where the Wisconsin River cuts through layers of Potsdam sandstone to create some picturesque views.  Boat tours of The Dells have been offered here for over a hundred years.  Over time, amusement parks, water parks (including the largest one in the world), miniature golf courses (included the largest in the world, containing five 36-hole courses), Ripley’s Believe It or Not, T-shirt shops, and other attractions have grown up in the area.  It has a feel much like Gattlinburg and Pidgin Forge.  The main street has a lot of shops, but they have more of a beach feel than a Gattlinburg, crafty feel.

 

We began the day with an all-you-can-eat, family-style breakfast of pancakes, eggs, potatoes, sausages, ham, and biscuits with gravy at Paul Bunyan’s.  I really enjoy the Phineas and Ferb cartoon.  Those who watch the show will remember the episode Greece Lightning, in which the kids race chariots past a restaurant, called Paul Bunyan’s and the song that plays, “Paul Bunyan’s, where the food is good, but not too good, eh.”  So, we just had to eat here.  The food was good, the price was reasonable, and the services was excellent.

After breakfast we took a two hour boat trip to the Upper Dells.  This included two opportunities to get out and walk through some of the interesting rock formations.  At one of the stops, a trained German Shepherd leaped from a cliff to a tall rock formation, called Standing Rock.  It was pretty silly, but fun, and it happened so fast, I missed taking a picture of it.

The boat tour was very hot.  When we got off the boat to wander around, the sandstone formations provided some natural air conditioning.

 

After the boat ride, we went on the Bigfoot Zip Line “Tour.”  This was crazy expensive, but we had a great, three-hour adventure.  After a safety briefing and having our equipment triple checked, we boarded a “Duck” to get us to the first tower.  There were six towers with slides that ranged from 580 to 1300 feet in length.  The folks running the place were personable but professional.  This was a quality outfit.

There were fifteen of us in our tour group, so we never had to wait too long.  We had the same pair of guides with us the whole time, one hooking us in at the top, and the other one “catching” at the bottom.

All of us had been on a zip line before, but some of the other folks in our group were petrified for the first few runs.  A couple of people panicked and got caught in the middle, so one of the guides had to slide out to them and pull them to the landing tower by hand.

Because of Sam’s weight, she didn’t have to break on the way down.  She could just enjoy the ride.  This place even encouraged us to “do tricks.”  We took running leaps off the tower to start our runs.  We rode upside down.  We leaped backward off the tower.

At the end I felt bad, because a larger percentage of our guides’ pay is based on tips, and most of our group stiffed them.

By this time, we were very hot, so we went back to the motel to spend an hour in the pool.  The pool had two things you don’t often see at motel pools any more: slides and a diving board.

The water was a very comfortable temperature and was welcome after a hot morning on the boat and a hot afternoon (about 106 degrees) on the zip line.

Because the pool had a diving board, it offered the kids a chance to practice diving.

After the pool, we went to dinner and then drove down to the main part of the town to walk around the various junk shops.  We also had to get our obligatory old-time photo taken.  It wouldn’t be a vacation without the old-time photo!  One store we found was called Root Beer Revelry.  The entire store was dedicated to different kinds of root beer from different vendors, most in glass bottles.  Tommy and I bought a six-pack of assorted root beers.  Candy and Sam also bought a four pack of assorted other nostalgic pops.  As we were walking back to the car with these packs of glass bottles, we got LOTS of strange looks from the passersby who obviously thought Tom was carrying real beer.  In fact, at one point we saw a policeman rushing toward us, and I thought someone had called the cops on us!  It was very funny.

So, were the Wisconsin Dells touristy?  Certainly.  Did we have a great time.  Absolutely.

Happy birthday, United States of America.

 

The Star Spangled Banner

Francis Scott Key

 

O say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation.
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

(Source of lyrics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner)

 

Despite those poltroons in Washington who are intent of vilifying, destroying, or giving away everything that made this country great and everything I stand for, I thought it might be nice to list all four verses of our National Anthem before the ACLU, some atheist group, or someone else decides it is offensive and tries to have it banned.

Day four of our trip was dedicated to seeing the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  I remember visiting this museum as a kid, and I hoped that time hadn’t over romanticized my memories of the place.  I have to say that it was better than I remember and that I could have spent another few hours there without much difficulty.

The two things for which the museum is best known are the U-505 and the coal mine.  The U-505 is a German submarine captured in WWII by Capt Gallery, USN, from submarine hunter killer team 23.4 of the 10th Fleet.  The story is remarkable.  In 2005 they moved the submarine from its old location on the museum grounds to its new home four floors below the museum.  The displays leading up to the tour of the submarine itself are quite well done.  (Interestingly, they use clips from the television documentary The World at War, but they’ve re-dubbed the narration (word for word it seems) with someone other than Sir Lawrence Olivier.)  I think they do a tremendous job of bringing the story to life.  The docent for the tour of the sub itself was quite good.  Sam really enjoyed the tour, especially the bullet holes on the port side of the conning tower.

We then took the tour or the coal mine.  In this exhibit, we went down a mine shaft into a replica of a coal mine.  Inside the mine they have working replicas of mining equipment to give you an idea of what working in a mine might have been like.  Before going into the mine, there is a really nice oral history of life in a mining town that I think was largely ignored by the other visitors.  The docent said that all those working the coal mine exhibit spend some time each year touring real coal mines within Illinois to re-familiarize themselves.  I got the impression that the docents really understood mining; they were not just talking from a prepared script.  I also found it interesting that only 50% of the nation’s coal goes toward the production of electricity.  The other half goes to pharmaceuticals, plastics, and other products.  The docent showed a picture of coal deposits throughout Illinois.  There’s a lot of coal to be mined if we were serious about energy independence and not giving money to people who hate us.

I probably could have spent another two hours in this wing.  There were lots of “school groups” here, which made it difficult to really take advantage of all the displays.  Tommy got a little frustrated at kids who would jump in front of him to fiddle with a display without really trying to learn anything about the science being taught.  Anyway, there were a number of displays that described movement of soils (the avalanche display was tremendous), winds, lightening, water flows, light, etc.  The exhibits were quite excellent.  You could hear the Tesla coil across the room.

We didn’t spend much time in the aviation exhibits, but this Stuka caught my eye.  There was a tremendous set of exhibits on genetics, but the area was crawling with kids, and we got there toward the end of our allotted time, so we only saw a small subset of them.

There was a large exhibit on the railroads and how steam engines work.  The centerpiece of the display was a huge replica of Chicago and the surrounding areas populated by model trains.  The kids didn’t want to spend much time there (We’ve seen model trains before, Dad!”), but the displays on how steam locomotives operate were well worth the time.

After an enjoyable time at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, we had to fight our way out of Chicago during rush hour.  Bad timing!  We reached our hotel in the Wisconsin Dells 90 minutes later than we had planned, but we still had time to take a swim in the hotel pool before bed.

We left Sandusky and headed West to Indiana.  We’ve traveled through Gary many times between home and Mark, IL, as a kid, and I never knew this even existed.  On the Southern-most end of Lake Michigan is a national park and a state park preserving some natural wetlands and sand dunes.

We hiked through the Cowles Bog area.  The bugs weren’t too bad.  We hiked through deep sand, up and down steep dunes, so the four-mile hike was a bit strenuous.  We saw a couple of blue heron in the marsh, but I wasn’t quick enough with my camera.

Eventually, after a number of steep climbs, we reached the shore of Lake Michigan.  The water was surprisingly warm.  We spent a relaxing hour in the water, wading out some distance to a  sand bar, and playing frisbee.

This view gives you some idea of how steep the dunes were near the water’s edge.  The largest of these sand dunes is Mt. Baldy.  These dunes normally move about four feet a year, but because of tourists trampling the delicate grasses that hold the dunes, Mt. Baldy is moving 26 feet a year.

They have most of Mt. Baldy roped off.  Tourists are supposed to stay on marked trails.  You can see the footprints here where people have ignored the signs.  The park ranger said each footprint will result in the movement of a ton of sand.  In a year or two they expect the parking lot and bath house to be covered over with sand.  You can see how the sands have just about covered some trees in this photo.

It was a relatively strenuous day, but we had fun.

We spent the second day of our vacation at Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.  I hadn’t been to Cedar Point if almost 30 years.  When we were kids Cedar Point seemed to be the place you went if you couldn’t go somewhere better.  Over the years, I’ve seen Cedar Point mentioned a number of times on the Discovery Channel for having the best, fastest, highest, or some other -est roller coaster in the world.

Both of you who read my blog may remember me ranting a bit about Six Flags New England and how disappointed I was.  That’s why we scheduled Cedar Point early in the vacation — so if it was bad, it wouldn’t be the culminating event of this year’s vacation.  I told Candy before we started that this was the part of the trip I was least looking forward to.  We really had a good time.  The roller coasters were fun.  The park was immaculately clean.  The food was terrific and reasonably priced.  The workers were pleasant and all spoke English.  Even the patrons were largely well behaved.

For the week of Fourth of July, Cedar Point was giving free admission to active duty military and their families.  That was a very pleasant surprise.  Since we had the admission money budgeted, we decided to use it pay for Fastlane  passes for all of us.  That meant we got to move to the head of the line for most rides.  As a result we rode everything we wanted before the bad weather rolled in — more on that later.

I remember the Corkscrew, Gemini, and Blue Streak being the roller coasters of choice.  At one point they said that the Corkscrew was built in 1976.  Wow, did I feel old.  These rides are now sort of passé, replaced by Millennium Force (the number one steel coaster in the world several years running), Mean Streak (which might be the  best wooden roller coaster I’ve ever ridden), and others.

Halfway through riding the Mean Streak wooden roller coaster, Candy discovered that her glasses were missing (from where she had been shoving them inside her shirt all day during rides).  She found them under her shirt, but when we got off the roller coaster, she realized that one of the lenses was missing.  We got right back on the ride.  Because it wasn’t crowded, we waited for the correct color train and got in the exact same seats.  She found her lens!  That’s what comes of clean living.

As we were getting off our last coaster for the day, a huge storm rolled through the area.  We took cover in a cookie shop — requiring us to spend some cash on giant cookies.  We just HAD to do it.  I have never been in an amusement park during hail (the size of grapes), so that was a unique experience.  After they made the decision to cancel the evening entertainment, we left the park about an hour before closing.  The bad weather only served to cut out the kids’ time to re-ride their favorite rides from earlier in the day; we had gone on everything once.

Cedar Point was a far superior experience to our visit to Six Flags New England last Summer.  It was a really nice second day of vacation.

 

We began this year’s vacation, by retrieving Sam.  She had spent the previous week camping in Sandusky at the KOA with her friend Emma and Emma’s family.  We got on the road Saturday heading West.  They got on the road Saturday heading East.  We met just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike near the Ohio border.

After picking up Sam, we continued Westward to Cleveland.  We stopped there to see the house where much of the shooting of A Christmas Story was filmed.  A fan of the movie bought the house on Ebay and restored it.  He also bought the house across the street and turned it into a museum.

He’s collected a couple of neat artifacts.  He’s also produce a pretty nice video.

Some of the items are not from the movie.  For instance, the leg lamp from the movie was thrown away after they broke it for that scene in the movie.  He has done a nice job of collecting like items, however.

He’s also done a really nice job restoring the kitchen and bathroom.

We all enjoyed the visit.  I’m not sure that I’d make it a destination, but if you’re passing through the area, it’s well worth a stop for 90 minutes or so.

After visiting the Christmas Story house, we continued to Sandusky.  As is our SOP, we stayed in a mom and pop hotel on the outskirts of town.  It was quaint and clean.  We also had time for a little putt-putt golf before hitting the sack.

Socks are only for bowling.

You never use an umbrella because the rain will be over in five minutes.

A good parking place has nothing to do with distance from the store, but everything to do with shade.

You can tell the difference between fire ant bites and mosquito bites.

Anything under 70 degrees is chilly.

You’ve driven through Yeehaw Junction.

You know that… no other grocery store can compare to Winn Dixie.

You know that anything under a Category 3 just isn’t worth waking up for.

You dread love bug season.

You are on a first name basis with the Hurricane list. They aren’t Hurricane Charley or Hurricane Frances. You know them as Andrew, Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Wilma, Irene, Cheryl, Rita, Mary, Alison.

You know what a snowbird is and when they’ll leave!

You think a six-foot alligator is actually pretty average.

‘Down South’ means Key West .

Flip-flops are everyday wear.

Shoes are for business meetings and church, but you HAVE worn flip flops to church before.

You have a drawer full of bathing suits, and one sweatshirt.

You get annoyed at the tourists who feed seagulls.

A mountain is any hill 100 feet above sea level.

You know the four seasons really are: Hurricane season, love bug season, tourist season and summer.

You’ve hosted a hurricane party.

You can pronounce Okeechobee, Kissimmee, Withlacoochee, Thonotosassa and Micanopy.

You understand why it’s better to have a friend with a boat, than have a boat yourself.

You were 25 when you first met someone who couldn’t swim.

You’ve worn shorts and used the A/C on Christmas and New Years.

You recognize Miami-Dade as Northern Cuba.

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to demonstrate.

It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.

~~ Father Denis Edward O’Brien, USMC

This is a picture we had taken on our vacation.  Some places that do these photos don’t put much heart into it.  This place was a great deal of fun.  The owner really made it an event.