Monday, we bid adieu to family and headed back toward Iowa. We decided we needed a tour of the Mississippi River on the way, so we drove to Dubuque, then north on the scenic route, including a stop at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lock and Dam #10 to watch barges pass through the locks on the way upstream to be reloaded.
Arriving at Decorah, we grabbed lunch and then scouted out the city campground, which was conveniently located on a spur trail near the famous Trout Run Trail that we came to ride.
We decided that early morning would be better, when we were fresh, and turned in early, our first tent camping adventure since August 2013.
Sunday dawned clear and cool: Matt, CJ, and we oldsters drove down to Olin Park on Lake Monona to ride our bikes out through the UW Arboretum and then north and down the Southeast Trail back to the park, a total of 19.5 km, with 95 meters of climbing. Most of the ride was on bike trails and the Arboretum roads, but in between were several residential streets with no bike lanes and a vague idea of the general direction to go.
Across Monona Bay.
We had ridden the Southeast Trail two years ago, so that was familiar, but the rest was new. Matt’s bike was misadjusted so that he couldn’t shift into the large chainring, and CJ hasn’t yet been schooled in the art of distance cycling, so we were able to pull ahead often, then slow to a leisurely pace to wait for them to catch up. This wasn’t a long ride, but did prove our hill-climbing ability, with long but not steep hills.
“The guys,” playing with “sinky toys” in the pool.
After our ride, we lounged by the pool at Matt’s apartment complex, and Ashley and Travis joined us for a barbecue. A long day in the sun, but most pleasant, surrounded by family.
Saturday’s plan was to meet the older grandkids at the Madison Saturday Market, held on Capitol Square downtown. They live downtown, so that was convenient.
Travis
Ashley
However, the torrential rain early morning was not convenient. Nevertheless, we made our way downtown with CJ in tow, parked at the Terrace,, and walked through the drizzle to Starbucks. Fortunately, the rain let up long enough to tour the market. Lots of fresh vegetables, cheeses, baked goods, and meats, even though the vendors had to set up in the rain. Ashley had a shopping list, which took one circuit to fill, and CJ talked us into some spicy cheese bread, apparently his favorite…
Saturday Market in the rain
We had time to spare before lunch, and it started to lightly rain again, so Ashley suggested we tour the Capitol. There weren’t many tourists inside yet, with the market in full sway outside, so we wandered from the base of the rotunda up many flights of stairs, peering into the locked Supreme Court and Assembly halls through the iron gates, and looking down from the galleries at each level, finally reaching as high as visitors are allowed, the outside observation deck at the base of the dome.
We had a spectacular and windy view of downtown and lakes Mendota and Monona. We really enjoyed the tour, and took in the small Capitol restoration and history museum just below the observation deck before winding back down all those flights of stairs to the street level. We departed just as the market vendors were packing up and the rain returned, so the press of Capitol visitors were starting to gather on the lower levels.
The downtown restaurants were also crowded, so we split up, Travis and Ashley to fetch Travis’s car, and we to fetch ours from the parking garage, and headed east to an Olive Garden Restaurant, where the rest were already seated and waiting for us. After lunch, we headed back west, for an afternoon and evening of movie-watching at Matt’s. Sunday promises to be sunny weather again, so we might be back on the trails with the whole family, this time.
Rain was predicted for Friday, and rain it did. We had planned for an “errand” day. First, a trip to the Group Health Cooperative clinic nearby (GHC of Southern Wisconsin, not part of our GHC HMO in Washington/Oregon/Idaho) for some lab work. Bearing a prescription from home, we had to go through the ordeal of registration and lots of paperwork, so it took much longer than the 10 minutes it takes at home.
Then, off to Costco for a few items, including a backup disk for the laptop, since we are on the road for a couple of months and not connected to the network backup system at home. Another stop at Best Buy for a portable scanner in anticipation of having photos to scan during our visits and reunions.
Of course, “some assembly required” prevails when setting up backups on a device meant for Windows and Mac: first, reformat the hard drive to the Linux ext4 file system from ntfs, then install and configure rsnapshot to back up the data directories. The backup on a fresh disk took several hours for over 300GB of data. Setting up the scanner will wait for another day–the xsane Unix utility should detect and manage it…
A late evening out for dinner: Despite temperatures predicted dropping to 12 C overnight, Wisconsinites dine outside in short sleeves and shorts whenever there is no snow on the ground. We Pacific Northwesterners, however, more used to layering, fetched jackets from the car as the sun dropped below the horizon.
One of the many bridges on the Pheasant Branch Trail.
Today promised to be the best weather all week–hot but dry, so we put the “Q” tandem on top of the car and headed to Middleton’s Quisling Park, the western terminus of the Pheasant Branch trail system. The short and fast paved trail meandered along the creek, first through commercial parks on the prairie, then diving and twisting down through a wooded run, ending at a nature conservancy, where the trails were crushed limestone, so we turned around.
The trail continued downhill on gravel, not a good surface for tandems, so we turned around.
The trip back was not as steep as it seemed, so we made good time, and took a couple of side trails a short distance. On the trail paralleling US 12 West, we were overtaken by a legless man in a racing wheelchair, who was continuing north, while we turned around at the Airport Road. Another side trail led to the Costco parking lot, but we didn’t have enough cargo space to do our shopping today, so we returned to the main trail and continued on, making a few parking lot loops at the end of the trail to reach our distance goal for the day, 16 km.
Circling the parking lot to reach the 16km distance bogey for today. We chose not to ride the unpaved trail segments or get too far off the main trail, so came up short. A longer ride would have been nice, but it was getting hot toward noon.
In the afternoon, we drove south to the village of Oregon, to meet our grandson after school. We went for coffee to the Firefly Coffeehouse, one of our favorite anywhere in the country. CJ was anxious to show us his computer work, after introducing us to his YouTube channel, where he posts videos of games he is working on. He’s a beta tester for a 2D game and also works on the Wiki to explain tips and tricks of the evolving game, working closely with the designer/programmer.
Somehow, we let ourselves be talked into entering the XBox360 world of Minecraft. I generally avoid video games altogether, being satisfied with a limited range of what used to be board games–cards, tiles, word and number puzzles, etc. But, it was important to him to share, so we grasped the ears of the very unfamiliar controller and got quickly sucked into the game grid. After a brief, on the move introduction, we deduced that the buttons and toggles on the controller consisted of thumb controls for tilt-and-pan and left-right-forward-back, with some sort of switch action, four mode switches, which controlled vertical jumps, switching between first-person and third-person point of view, and other functions we didn’t get. There are also four finger switches on the top of the controller that performed actions, like striking and picking up and putting down objects, which ended up in various inventory displays at the top or bottom of the screen.
Video game lesson–grandpa is the student here.
Sitting close to his large monitor, first-person POV became immersive, with a feeling of moving clumsily through a strange world with a limited field of view and physics that didn’t work quite right, but could be compensated for fairly quickly. Nevertheless, our first foray into Minecraft consisted primarily of finding shelter and hunkering down, avoiding traps and pitfalls on the way. Not very exciting for a 13-year old, but he was happy that we at least tried and managed to keep our characters alive (but not without help).
We got into a discussion of programming (he does mostly Javascript, probably due to lack of tools for other languages), inevitably leading to the subject of Linux. He asked how I came to Linux, and I had to explain that I worked with similar systems before, had built a Linux computer as soon as it had become somewhat functional, and earned a living managing large Linux systems and installations for nearly 20 years. With the hint that, while Microsoft owns the game world, with Windows and XBox the primary gaming platforms, Linux powers the Internet, we may be able to wean him from the Dark Side yet.
Family resemblance. Granny’s shirt features a bicycle and “I ride to burn off the crazy.” Well, does not apply here–we’re having a good time visiting everyone in one long trip.
Dinner out, a dog walk, and more gaming demos kept us out very late, for a school night, so we left him with a promise of more time over the weekend.
Monday, we bid adieu to family and headed back toward Iowa. We decided we needed a tour of the Mississippi River on the way, so we drove to Dubuque, then north on the scenic route, including a stop at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lock and Dam #10 to watch barges pass through the locks on the way upstream to be reloaded.
Arriving at Decorah, we grabbed lunch and then scouted out the city campground, which was conveniently located on a spur trail near the famous Trout Run Trail that we came to ride.
We decided that early morning would be better, when we were fresh, and turned in early, our first tent camping adventure since August 2013.
