In Wisconsin we call this time of year “Pre-Spring”. It could also be called “Post-Winter”, but since the Wisconsin state motto is “Forward” we are always looking forward (and by the end of February you can get quite sick of Winter). When you think of Winter you think of snow, snow, cold, more snow and more cold. When you think of Spring you think of plants blooming, flowers popping and opening, trees budding and then leafing out. So “Pre-Spring” (or “Post-Winter” for you Negative Nellies) is characterized by melting snow, ugly black snow banks, messy yards and, of particular interest to us, muddy and very messy trails in the woods. We’ve done lots of mud hiking before; we’ve mentioned it many times in the past here — Tammy’s lost a shoe (well, it came off, not really lost), we’ve hopped from rock to rock trying to keep our feet dry on flooded trails and most recently had to turn around when the good Lord didn’t will it and the creek did rise on us at Roche-a-Cri. Why talk about “Pre-Spring” and mud-hiking? Because this year we did not want to do it!!! So, instead of mud-hiking we looked for places where we would have paved trails that would be nice and melted. Our attention turned toward Madison, WI and our “bonus daughter” Angela. We hadn’t seen her since this whole pandemic began, and we were excited for the chance to see if she would want to do some walking with us. We called and she said yes!! Mike pulled out trusty “All Trails” and found……nothing. So he started hunting around and found there was a trail that circled around Lake Monona that looked to be 11 miles long. We could do that! However, Angela, miss cross-country-running-training-for-a-triathlon, thought walking 11 miles with us was a little too much. We decided to get to Madison early and go for a shorter walk with her and do the 11 miles just the two of us after “Happy Hour”.
Since it was a longer hike to get to Madison (get it?) we were out the door at 6AM. The plan had us stopping at the Broadway Diner in Baraboo, WI. This is an awesome little “shiny diner”. When we got there we thought it felt just like eating at a quaint little diner in New Jersey. Then we read the history and found out the diner actually used to be in Groton, CT and was move to Baraboo in 2005. It was built originally by the Patterson Vehicle Company in Patterson, NJ — so our feeling was right on track!! That is how well this diner was restored! If the diner itself was done that well, the food should be phenomenal too, right? Right? Well, yes it was!!! We finally found a restaurant that would take us outside of our comfort zone to order something we don’t usually have. Tammy’s was the closest to a “normal” breakfast — she had the Farmer’s Market Benedict Scramble (minus the corn bread) and Mike had the Country Benedict Scramble (minus the potato pancakes) and both of us had awesome salads. Seriously — look at the menu, if you make it to Baraboo it is imperative that you stop and eat here.
We were then off to Madison to pick up Angela. We stopped by her apartment and anxiously waited for her outside. We saw her come bouncing across the street and she hopped in the van and it was like we never missed any time with her. Stupid COVID means no hugs and having to wear masks, but just being able to see her, walk and talk with her was very uplifting. She is such a breath of fresh air and always good for lots of smiles and laughs. We headed towards the Henry Vilas Zoo for a quick one hour-ish walk. We had already been to the zoo, and it was pretty busy so we were just looking for some nice walking. Turned out this is the kind of walk we absolutely adore! It was through older neighborhoods with most houses having been renovated to keep their old style, their historic charm. It is amazing the houses that were built and how unique they all are. We ended up near campus where the houses are still old and full of rustic charm, but had touches that only students can bring to the mix: bikes, beer cans, camp chairs and evidence of their taking time off from their studies to have a good time.
Our walk came too quickly to an end, but it was awesome catching up with Angela. As we took her back to her apartment, it was not “goodbye” as we were going to take her along with us to #SupperClubSaturday later that afternoon. Lake Monona was calling….but not hard enough to draw Tammy away from a quick trip to Trader Joe’s. Mike has 2 go-to items at Trader Joe’s: their 85% chocolate bars and their ultra dark coffee and he had been out of both of those for quite some time so he was also pretty ok about making a stop too. We picked up some of Tammy’s favorite items too: green goddess dressing, balsamic glaze and some other unique items. Finally we were off for Olin Park to enjoy our quick happy hour before our walk around the lake.
Mike always has us planned almost down to the minute. Today the 11 mile walk around the lake should take us about 3.5 hours without much of a problem. He even had it planned down to if we had enough extra time before we had to pick up Angela, we could park and walk around the area by her apartment. After the bloodies were gone we walked off down the trail. The first part of the trail was pretty gosh darn…..boring. Standard walking trail in a city — cars on one side and snow and businesses on the other. Thankfully this did not last for long as we quickly moved on to a little road along the lake. Here we had nice houses on one side and absolutely gorgeous, amazing homes and smaller cottages on the other lakeside. It was interesting to see the differences among all the houses and cottages that circled this part of the lake. They ranged for upgraded houses that were worth almost a million dollars to unimproved cottage-style houses that have most likely been in families for generations that were only worth a paltry 750,000 dollars. This was one of the first nice days of Pre-Spring so there were LOTS of people out and about. Most on bikes, (this really was a bike trail after all) but there were plenty of walkers like us too (most were probably not “dumb enough” to try to make it all the way around the lake though). We were making pretty good time and enjoying all the houses, Mike even added a little 1/2 mile detour to go down another loop just to see more lakeside houses (insert loud, reverberant fore-shadowing music) because “we had plenty of time.” The view across the lake made it look HUGE!!! You could see the Capitol on the very far side of the lake. It was pretty magical.
One of Mike’s favorite things to do when walking past big, old or unique houses is to whip out his phone and pull up Zillow just to see how much the houses are worth. We passed by a couple that we just had to know — they were both $2.5 million. WOW! However, the crazy thing that Mike found was the property taxes that were being paid on those $2.5M homes as $50,000 a year!! YIKES! The monthly cost of that property tax is several times what we pay for our mortgage PLUS our property tax. Wow….even if we were gifted that house we would not even be able to afford the property tax.
We eventually popped up a little off the lake and right past somewhere that we had been many times — Monona Grove High School. We spent plenty of Saturdays there at show choir competitions over the years. We then walked along the main drag of Monona Grove and eventually made it back down by the lake. Looking at how far we had come, about 8 miles, and looking across the lake we both kept saying…”that looks so much farther than 3 miles to go”. Once again Mike whips out his phone and opens Google Maps — we had 5 miles to go….WHAT?!?! But that would mean our walk would be 13 miles…it was only supposed to be 11 miles? That’s it — one of Tammy’s favorite sayings “Trust the Google” just got thrown out the window, because it HAD to be wrong!. How were we off by 2 miles! Well, we had 5 miles to go and a little over an hour and a half to get there. We had better pick up the pace. Wouldn’t you know this was also the time that we started to get into some sloppy sidewalks and had to walk across a snow covered field — passing by some cool drum music by some percussion group in a park. We wish we could have stopped to see exactly what was going on, but just walking past was cool. Tammy texted Angela saying that we would be later than our planned 4PM to pick her up — she said no problem she was still working on a group project. Once again we were on the path of really cool old houses. We may have picked up our pace, but we still enjoyed all the old houses that we got to admire on our walk.
We talked about stopping and taking an Uber back to the car so we would not be late for dinner; we were trying to get to the car at 4PM, so we could pick up Angela and be to the restaurant at 4:30PM, but neither of us really wanted to do that. We hoofed it!!! We finally made it back to the van at 4:15PM. We had time to pick up Angela and make it the restaurant by 4:40ish — only ten minutes late –that was a miracle!!!
We jumped in the van and took off for Angela’s apartment. Tammy texted her on the way and said we would be there about 4:25 — this was going to work, we would only be about 10 minutes behind! But, as luck would have it, Angela ended up running late too. She gets done with her team project, drops her books at a friends, grabs a long board and starts riding back to her apartment about 4:40.
So we arrived at Toby’s Supper Club at 5:03PM. There were a LOT of cars which is what we were afraid of since they do not take reservations. Angela ran in to to see if they could seat 3 anytime soon and as luck would have it, they had room for us! We were seated and quickly started into more talk of times gone by and times to come.
We got our relish tray and were also treated to one of the “Angela-isms” we have come to love so much over the years. This young lady is one of the smartest, most “put together” people I have ever known. She is also rather….. naive and well, not too savvy. When they set the platter down, she kind of looked at it quizzically and asked Tammy, “What are those red and white things by the carrots?” “Angela. those are radishes!” She was completely taken aback! “Can you eat them or are they just for looks?” At this point, we just didn’t know what to say so Tammy just took a bite. Angela actually enjoyed her first taste of the “exotic” radish and we have another Angela story to add to the archive. We also had some awesome cheese curds! Sadly they did not have Prime Rib, so Mike had to settle for a T-bone steak, Tammy had steak and shrimp and Angela had the fish fry. Unfortunately while both of our steaks were done perfectly, both lacked seasoning. A perfectly cooked med-rare and rare steak with no seasoning isn’t very appetizing. Sadly where this supper club delivered so strongly last time were here, this time it was a swing and a miss. 😦 Unfortunately we will not hurry to get back here again. But where the food failed us, the conversation was awesome. We sure do miss our time with Angela!! The evening was too soon done and we were taking Angela back to her apartment. Bitter sweet to have to say goodbye again, but we are sure we will see her sooner than we did between now and the last time.
The drive home was long, but thankfully uneventful.
Splorin' Saturday 