A Trip to the Better Dairy State

Last week was a trip to Wisconsin for me to visit my brother Steve and his family. It started about three weeks before, when my niece Amanda put a video on Facebook of her daughter, Natalie, taking her first steps. Fearful that I was going to miss out on her babyhood, I decided to fly back for a couple of days and visit, since I had found a flight from Los Angeles to La Crosse that was dirt cheap.

The flight left at 8:05 a.m. on Thursday. The shuttle service reserved me for a 4:45 a.m. departure from home. I did all my packing and cleaning the night before, so all I had to do was get up, get dressed, grab the suitcase and the shoulder bag and I was off.

I set my clock for 4 a.m. but it didn't go off. I awoke at 4:17 and started racing around, getting ready. About eight minutes later, while I was still trying to wake up all the way, the shuttle showed up at the curb. I powered up my cell phone and found a voice message on it, delivered at 3 a.m., saying the shuttle would be early, and I should adjust my plans accordingly. I dashed down to the shuttle without even time for a quick cup of coffee.

The flight to Minneapolis wasn't too bad, except that my legs always get cramped after about an hour. Upon arriving at MPS airport, I found that I had plenty of opportunity to stretch my legs, seeing that my flight arrived at gate G-22, which is about six miles from the main terminal (or so it seems). This airport makes Heathrow in London look compact. There are moving walkways to help you along, but it's still a hike, especially lugging bags.

I got down to the main concourse and found a food court, where I experienced the most inedible hamburger I have ever encountered at the A&W booth. Of course, I ate it.

Stepping outside for the cigarette also becomes a major effort in this airport, as there seems to be only one entrance that opens up to something other than a boarding gate. Finding the main entrance meant another long walk down the main concourse to the ticketing area. Along the way, I ran into this person dressed like a bear wearing a Twins uniform. After some research (post-trip), I discovered this was T.C. Bear (T.C. standing for Twin Cities).Luckily, I had a two-hour layover, so I could get all this stuff in.

My flight to La Crosse left from the B concourse, which meant a tram ride (I had found the tram by then) and then a much shorter hike down the B concourse to my flight. Both coming and going, I had the seat on the plane to myself and the flight's less than an hour.

Now, you have to understand that my experience with visiting Steve and Pam and Amanda and Emily (and now Natalie) is that things just move a whole lot slower there, and that's one of the reasons I like it so much. Steve picked me up at the airport around 5 o'clock and we set off for their home in Ettrick, which is about 35 miles north of La Crosse. For dinner, we had Pam's Positively Potent Pepper Pot soup (my moniker, not hers). In more primitive days, folks would have thought she was trying to put a curse on them: It was very tasty, but very peppery. The rest of the evening was sitting and visiting and doting on Natalie.

Friday, Steve and I drove Pam in to her office, as she was winding up the school year and prepping for summer session simultaneously. Steve was also mired in papers to grade, but he has the summer off. Both of them spent a lot of time with their laptops, grading papers, while we visited. So while Pam was at the office, Steve and I went to lunch. Afterward, we stopped by his office (Pam works at the technical college and Steve worked at UW La Crosse), and got a chance to meet some of his academic cohorts.

After picking up Pam, we stopped and got a take-and-bake pizza, then popped into the supermarket to pick up makings for my French toast (which Emily had requested I make sometime during my visit). When we got back to Ettrick, we stopped into Weiner's bar where Emily works. It's a slightly run-down neighborhood bar, shabby around the edges but with a barback that's at least 130 years old and a pretty impressive collection of sports memorabilia.

Back home, Steve baked the pizza. Amanda had picked up some fish and chips from a local place that does it once a week as a Friday special. I ended up eating the fish. Friday night is movie night, and since they now have a Wii console, they can stream films (although there are lots of buffering problems which interrupt the film numerous times for several minutes each. After some of this, we reverted to a rental disk.

All this time, of course, Natalie is the absolute center of attention. She has a huge basket full of toys and a couple free-standing pieces. All of them are electronic and make lots of noise. My favorite one is a table completely covered with shiny flashing plastic buttons. A Seussesque piano keyboard has rainbow keys that sing out their colors; another counts every time you push it; a tab slide sings "up" and "down," depending on which direction you push; press the letter keys and the table sings the ABCs song with a downbeat. Natalie loves dancing to that one. I turned to Amanda as the table sang ABCs and colors and numbers. "You know what's happening there, don't you?" I asked her. "What?" was her reply. "That table is programming your child."

Also, now that she's walking, she is also reaching for everything she can, which mean tabletop have everything on them pushed to the back, and everyone is on alert when she toddles near. Of course, the upshot of all this Natalie activity is that every toy gets a workout and everything must come out of the basket during playtime (which at 1 year old is all the time). So here are before and after shots of her busywork.

On Saturday fulfilled my promise and made French toast for the crowd (real French toast, from stale French bread and an egg-custard batter).
I think we just hung out at the house all day, because I can't remember anything of importance happening.

On Sunday we went into La Crosse for some sort of festival at Riverside Park. There was a tent in the park and 25¢ hot dogs, popcorn and root beer floats (though the floats were gone by the time we reached them). The steamboat museum was open, but we didn't go in. Walking over to the tent, it seemed like it was more a community-service type of event than a festival. It reminded me of some of the more dismal job fairs I've been to during my unemployment.

There were folks dressed up in period costumes (a fairly popular pastime, Pam tells me) and the giant cow with which I am pictured above. It put me in mind of the giant perch, the giant six-pack and the giant native American statues which I posed before and were photo-chronicled on my previous visit. These people seem to like oversized representations of mundane but significant things.

We snagged some of the last tickets on the ersatz paddle boat that plies up and down the Mississippi on hour-long "cruises." We got to the park about 1 p.m., and all the 1:30 tickets were sold out, so we had to hang around for a while and wait for the boat to return. During that time we ran into Pam's siblings, who I hadn't met.

We started out on the upper deck of the boat, but the wind was cutting through several layers of clothing, so Steve and I headed down into the cabin, where it was warmer. Soon, Amanda and Natalie joined us. By this time, I think Natalie had figured out that I was kin of some sort and, therefore, exploitable. Here she's squirming and playing between Steve and me, pulling his hat off and modeling it herself, then chewing some on it.

After the cruise, we piled back into the minivan and headed back to Ettrick, where Steve and Pam and I went to the monthly community dinner at the Lutheran Church. Not a soup kitchen, not food for the poor; just a group of people who gather donations of food and put together a meal for everyone in the community. They even do take-out, and we took some back home for the girls.

Monday I slept in and pretty much vegetated the rest of the day, spending time with Natalie and the minions.

Tuesday, my flight left at 2:30, so I spent the morning visiting with the girls and packing up. Right in the middle of all this the phone rings (I do not get cell phone reception at their place, so I had put my phone on call forwarding to their land line). It was a woman from La Cañada Flintridge who was calling to set up an interview with me. Oddly enough, she was leaving town the next day, so I told her I would call once I got in and we could set something up. The interview will be sometime in the afternoon on the 26th.

We stopped at McDonald's on our way to the airport and had lunch before I got on the plane. Natalie seems to be doing quite well with solid foods, as long as she premasticates everything with her fingers. It still amazes me that babies are smelly, messy, uncompromising and loud, and yet we just find them adorable. Anyone else would get ostracized or worse for that kind of behavior.

Of course, on an airplane on an extended flight, they lose their adorable qualities very quickly indeed, especially if you're not related to them. But, luckily, there were no small kids on any of my flights, to or back. On the flight from La Crosse, we had this really funny flight attendant named Oscar. He was lots of fun and, as I said, I had the seat all to myself. On the flight from Minneapolis to L.A., I sat next to an incredibly skinny teen who looked like an avatar from the Sims: Justin Timberlake hat, RayBan specs and several electronic devices. He pretended to sleep through the entire flight, which was OK by me, since he kind of creeped me out.

After arriving at LAX, it took about 10 minutes to find my shuttle and I was home by 9 p.m. The trip was great and just the getaway I needed to recharge my batteries for the continued job search. And, as usual, it was really nice to be home, sleep in my own bed, and share my life with the person I love the most.