Northwoods Vacation

We just returned from a week in Wisconsin's north woods, near Lake Superior, and when I get things going there will be many photos to post. We had enjoyed beautiful weather up until the very last day, the homecoming day. Then it rained off and on all day long and we took forever to get home, finally arriving at our back door at 10:20 pm. We apparently were driving just behind some tornados, but were thankfully and blissfully ignorant of this fact until after they had done their damage south of us. With the sky overcast and gloomy I finally enjoyed some even lighting and took a good number of photos on the ride home. I can still hear the groans from the back of the van each time I turned around and headed back to some scene to be photographed.

I was burning along at 74 mph a few miles south of Hurley on Hwy 51 when a State Patrol car coming towards me turned on its lights and did a quick U-turn. Rats. He was very nice about it, at least, and I got some really pretty photos by the side of the road while he sat in his squad and wrote out my enormous ticket. I have only had one speeding ticket in my life up until now. That occurred back in Minnesota in the early '90s on a back road coming home from South Dakota. The officer at that time gave me a $40 ticket and then chided me on what a nice pair of shoes that $40 would have purchased, tch, tch. I wanted to punch his lights out.

My husband just came upstairs to tell me that our van was broken into last night. Passenger side window is smashed and the radio was ripped out of the dash. The only reason we left the van outside last night was because we have a friend's Land Rover parked in our garage. We were going to take the Land Rover on our trip, for fun (it's loaded), but after driving it home from the friend's house, realizing how little storage space there actually is in there after putting half a dozen people in, and then filling the tank with the requisite super premium gasoline for $50, we decided to take our roomier, slightly more economical though less exotic minivan. So, the Land Rover sits unharmed in our garage with $50 in its tank and our van is on the parking slab, bruised and battered.

Welcome back to the city.