River

Summer pics, day 3

Reprint from wading in the river:

Mr Bunches, explorer:

They are America.

Sunset over the "Classic McDonald's" near the end of Mr. F's nightly ride route.

Elephant statue at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens

This is at the Veteran's Museum on Capitol Square. There is a working periscope in the room commemorating the various wars Wisconsin residents have fought in. Mr Bunches is looking through it:

... and this is the view of the Capitol you can see through that periscope:

This is a diorama of Wisconsin soldiers fighting in the Pacific in World War II.

Bald eagle at Veteran's Museum:

Close up of bust from Capitol:

More summer pictures

Continuing from yesterday. This is another shot of Lake Pepin from my trip up north:

It is hard to tell from this, but that is a bald eagle. I saw 6 or 7 of them flying around that day. That's only the second time I've seen a bald eagle in the wild.

This is the sunset over Lake Mendota, looking from Madison across the lake (roughly) towards my house on the other side (and up the hill from the lake a bit.)

Sometimes when Mr F needs calming down, I take him for long rides down to downtown Madison, and we drive back through the UW-Madison campus. One night, we drove down a little dead-end street among a variety of student housing, and found it ended in a cul de sac that looks over Lake Mendota. That's where I took this picture.

This is from a park about a quarter-mile walk from our house. We walked there one night to wade, and found they'd put in a beach to swim. It was early June and we had the entire beach, and seemingly the entire lake, to ourselves.

This is my grandson; on the 4th of July we watched him, and were going to go to the beach with him and the boys. It was rainy and cold, so we went to the McDonald's nearby for breakfast and playing. He was dancing in an apparent effort to impress a little girl that was just out of the frame.

One night, while building a Lego Angry Birds castle with Mr Bunches, Sweetie was upstairs reading, and I noted that Mr F had been very quiet over by the couch; he was on the floor in front of the couch and I couldn't see him. So told Mr Bunches to peek over and see what he was doing.

"Is he okay?" I asked.

"Yeah he's fine," Mr Bunches said.

Five minutes later when I got up to get a drink, I saw that "fine" means "taking all the stuffing out of a couch cushion."

And here is that castle:

I haven't posted that many pictures here lately

So I'll make up for that over the next couple of weeks, posting some of my favorite pictures from the 72/90ths of summer that has already gone by.


Sculptures on the east side of Madison:

A mouse that was hiding in a sink drain in the changing room at a beach we went to:

Mr F raises the roof at B B Clarke beach in Madison:

Mr F relaxes as "rock beach" near our house, on Lake Mendota:

Motor trailer in a town along the Mississippi River in Northwest Wisconsin; I had to go about 4 1/2 hours north to interview a witness, and drove back along the Mississippi:

This is a bridge over the Mississippi. Technically, if you are driving from a location in Wisconsin to another location in Wisconsin, you should not have to cross the Mississippi River, which forms the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. But if you have a GPS, which, when you punch in the street and number of your house, decides to send you to that street and number in a town in Minnesota, you will get to cross the Old Miss, and then you will realize that you are going to be very late for dinner:

Storm clouds over a farm, western Wisconsin. (Yep, i was back in Wisconsin by this point.)

Marina on the Mississippi:

Beach on the Mississippi:

Scenic overlook. This is not the Mississippi anymore, but Lake Pepin in Wisconsin. Fort St. Antoine was a fort built in the 1680s in Wisconsin, by the French. The French would control this area of Wisconsin until the end of the 7 Years' War, in 1763, the result of which was the French ceding all land east of the Mississippi to England.

Had France won that war, it's possible that people in Wisconsin would speak French and have French traditions, the way Quebec does in Canada.

The veterans' museum is pretty cool.

I took a Friday off and we went to the Veteran's Museum as part of our bumming around Madison.

Here's the first ever USS Wisconsin:

An eagle. You probably guessed that.

It took SEVEN tries to get a picture of the boys that was at least acceptable. 

Here are the top 3. There are:

1. Security guard coming over to see if Mr F is still sitting on the display case:

"Mr F has had it with pictures": 

And my personal favorite "Dad, dad, these are the good guys right?"

Moving on to more modern eras:

Vietnam.  It was while I stood under this helicopter that I was a bystander to one of the saddest things I've seen in a long time.

As we were looking around, Mr Bunches had to go to the bathroom, which was just the other side of the helicopter display. So while he was in there I waited outside the door with Mr F, who was drinking from the bubbler.

As we waited, an elderly woman came in. She was wearing all sorts of red, white & bluish stuff, a scarf, a shirt, a flag pin, etc. She was accompanied by a woman who I took to be her daughter, about 50ish.

The elderly woman was talking about her service in Vietnam, and went into a lot of detail about what her life was like there. I was listening to her because she was only a few feet away, and Mr F was still getting water, while Mr Bunches was still in the bathroom.

This woman went on for probably 5 minutes about her experiences, including pointing to the helmet in the display and saying it looked like the one she wore, and how hot it was, and the noise, and all kinds of detail.

Then, at the end of her story, there was a pause, and as Mr F rejoined me, the woman's daughter said "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?"

The elderly woman didn't say anything else.

That's another USS Wisconsin there.

A little better picture. The blurriness comes from the fact that if you get the boys into position Mr F gives you 0.00000000001 seconds to snap the photo before moving, and Mr Bunches then tries to get him not to move, or if he can't stop him from moving, moves himself because Mr Bunches will not let Mr F be first in anything.

This is a scene from the War In Australia in World War II, which apparently was a real thing I'd never heard about before seeing this.

 This is I believe a torpedo or maybe a shell from one of the USS Wisconsins.  It wasn't labeled but it was by the rest of the USS Wisconsin stuff, and it looks like the kind of thing that would be used to blow something up.  It was nearly as big as me, although that's hard to tell from the shot.

They had a periscope in the museum and you could look out to see Capitol Square. This is a church Mr Bunches likes to go to when we go downtown and walk around.

And this is the view of the Capitol itself through that periscope.

"Hey guys I want to just take a picture of you in front of the cannon before we go."

They were pleased to do it.

We went wadin' in the river yesterday