Wisconsin Weekend: Friday

Our weekend began much as it proved throughout--without rush or bother or attachment to outcome. By late morning we'd loaded the car down with clothing, toys, and a picnic hamper packed with happy summer foods. Our hundred mile drive up to Eagle, Wisconsin was pleasantly punctuated with lunch (peaches, popcorn, and avocado/sprout sandwiches), traffic slowdowns, radio station surfing, blue skies and green grass. Graeme got restless as we passed a riverside playground in a random town we were passing through, so we stopped and played. Fishermen cast from their folding chairs on the grassy shore, four and five car freight trains slowly eased across the railway bridge, sunlight and breezes caressed the leafy canopy overhead, all while we watched Graeme climb stairs and "eeeeeeeeee!" his way down slides, clap and laugh as the swing tilted him higher and higher.

There's that saying that you don't know a heyday until that heyday is past. No. I know. My little family is in its heyday and there is no mistaking the magic and perfection of these days together. The park felt like it existed in a snow globe, the glitter of sunlight and dust motes and wildflower fluff drifting down around us in a slow, perfect blanket. Maybe that snow globe, that picturesque summer park day, will be something I carry with me into my old age. I hope so.

( Photos and the rest of our day's adventures. )

Wisconsin Weekend: Fourth of July at Old World Wisconsin

Saturday morning, awake before the boys, I curled up in the hotel room's armchair and read Boston Jane: An Adventure before showering and applying what proved to be an inadequate amount of sunscreen. We had a leisurely morning all the way around, picking up veggie sushi and dried fruit strips for brunch at the local Pick & Save before driving out to Old World Wisconsin for their old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration.

So, in 1964, the Wisconsin Historical Society got this hare-brained, brilliant, big idea to try and preserve the rural ethnic patchwork history of their state's settlement. They spent twelve years finding old farmhouses, barns, stores, and inns from around the state and then dismantled, rebuilt, and restored them on 500 some-odd acres that was part of Kettle Moraine State Forest. It opened in time for the bicentennial and is in a constant state of improvement as they add more farms and settlements, hire and train more interpreters and whatnot. So you park your car amongst the trees of a pine forest, pay your admission, and then are free to roam over 500 acres on foot. There's the crossroads village with a stagecoach inn, the ringing metal of a blacksmith, the chatty persuasion of the general store owner, the well to-do ladies and the Irish washerwoman. Then down the road, through the woods and across sunlit fields of wheat, through pastures with grazing sheep and oxen and horses, there are farms dotted here and there where the doors stand open and visitors are greeted warmly. Women in summer kitchens caught cooking cornbread or feeding chickens. Men plowing fields or oiling harness leather. Beans snaking up little stick tripods in heritage gardens, the school master sternly writing on the board in the schoolhouse, the cemetery sitting silent in the sun behind the church. Sunday, we would explore it all with hardly another modern visitor in sight. Today, though, we were there for the bustling excitement of the July Fourth celebrations where all the villagers and local farmers and reenactors from all over the place were there for the tug of war, the greased pole climb, the patriotic singing and poetry recitations, and the big set piece, the parade. We arrived just in time to see the parade wheel and stomp and sing its way to the parade grounds, representing chronologically, the settlement and changes of the 1830s-1900.

( Photos and more from the day. )

Wisconsin Weekend: A Full Day at Old World Wisconsin

The attendance numbers for July 4th at Old World Wisconsin was something like 1500 people. The next day, it appeared to be back to its average, maybe 200-300. That's attendants during the entire day on the entire 500+ acres. So you can see, we were very much alone most of the time with the costumed reenactors. At the gift shop and the cafe, back in the modern world, there were a handful of people to be seen but otherwise we felt like we had the entire place to ourselves. It was unreal.

Now that the parade was no longer an issue, two open air trams were in operation around the site letting you save some of the walking. They'd trundle down the road every thirty or forty minutes dropping or picking up anyone sitting at the roadside benches in the various ethnic settlement areas, within seconds they'd disappear, the dust would settle, and we'd be back in that dream state of the really good, really empty historical restoration/reconstruction work. At most, in the five hours we were there, we ran into maybe six to ten other modern people out on the land. They all drifted away within five or ten minutes and the rest of the time it was just us and these costumed residents. I don't know how they built this place, how they pay to maintain it, how they can afford for there to be so few visitors, but it feels like the most incredible secret in Wisconsin.

Pairs of horses and oxen dug enthusiastically into their afternoon hay. An old shady barn housed napping sheep and chickens, another sheafs of dried hay. Women wiped their hands on aprons and invited us in to tour their homes and most proudly their kitchens. Men tipped their hats and squinted up at the sun, commenting on the weather, their livestock, and the farm that could be found down the way. On a sheep farm, a woman spun wool thread, her black booted foot pumping softly on the spinning wheel's foot pedal. Calico dresses, aprons, and well-worn shirts hung out to dry. Wagons sat unhitched in the yards. It was missing the welcoming barking of dogs as we walked up the lane or the weaving of cats in the barns, but otherwise it was possible to imagine that it was real, that we'd found some time machine to a somewhat magical, perhaps romanticized past of rural life.

It was such a glorious day.

( Photos )