We are back. We drove around the old stomping grounds and stomped. We looked at my in-laws' last house, the one he built himself. We looked at a grandma's house, where she raised seven sons by herself after her husband was killed in an accident. We saw the upsets caused by Covid and distant shopping and distant working and time going by and changes of various types.
Lynn absorbs the outdoors like nobody else I know. She has been quite aware of a park more or less on the way there that we had never visited and we took a tour of the park. All county, state and national parks are fair game and all restore her soul. She has driven in all sorts of traffic but she likes to avoid heavy traffic if she can. After the park tour, we used an app to get where we were headed and as usual, we selected a slower route that avoided highways. We have lived in this town for 50 years but we have found that telling an app to give us a avoid-highways route takes us places and shows us scenes that are new to us.
We aimed for lunch at a restaurant in Minocqua but the doorman confided that after ordering, we would be waiting 45 minutes. We left and tried an old favorite but it was closed. There was a new place nearby and they had open tables. We placed our orders and waited about 45 minutes there, too.
We had folding chairs with us for the purpose of sitting beside still, blue water under a nice sky, to vegetate, meditate and concentrate. We never used them but did our vegging, meding and concening on a well-situated park bench in the waterfront park at Bayfield. We were aware that weather apps did not predict very good weather for the days of this trip but things went rather well, after all.
This was a trip that touched on childhood and teen places in Lynn's life. I took a trip like that once, but alone. I was surprised at how much places in my memory had changed over time. Lynn has not been away for so long and it didn't seem too totally different to her.
