(no subject)

[stormdog]

I'm envious of Andrea; she's logged hours more time driving my truck than I have since our vacation. In fact, I've driven it less than an hour since getting back, while she's driving it to work every day! Normally I wouldn't object in the slightest. After all, what's that they say about what's mine being hers and what's hers being mine? But that was before what's mine came to include a brand new Flight Director compass! Stuck firmly to the window below the rear view mirror, she has only to glance ever so slightly to her side to see, to a precision of 10º, what direction she's going at any given moment!

I, riding with serinthia or driving the Mercury, can only dream about how wonderfully in control she must feel, watching the gleaming black hemisphere of the compass dial spin smartly about on it's liquid bed as she races around the curves of the tollway. It's a thing of beauty I tell you.

Where did this magical instrument of navigation come from you ask? Well, as the inimitable Aahz would say, 'therein lies a story!'

Andrea picked me up from work on Friday afternoon so we could get on the road as soon as we could. We'd packed up and loaded the car the night before, and I'd spent a few minutes during the day printing Mapquest directions, so we were ready to go.

We drove near my aunt and uncle's house and, during our search for a diner at which to procure dinner, found the place that we'd eaten at with my grandparents during a visit last year. It was neat being there, and reminded me that I really need to talk to them again soon.

We continued north into what swiftly became some amazing fog. The combination of melting snow and a light drizzle seemed to be the perfect breeding ground for water suspended in the air. Within the space of fifteen minutes, visibility dropped enough to leave us comfortable at no more then about forty miles per hour at the most. I thrilled at that feeling of isolation and soft-edged oppression that comes from engulfment in the mist, imagining that we were the only people left in the world, or that we'd been swallowed up by the fog of Ravenloft.

Eventually, we made it to Delavan. We were keeping an eye out for the Goodwill that Andrea knew was there, but even so we completely missed the exit in the haze. We turned around at the next one and went back where we were greeted with what was quite possibly the most uninteresting thrift store we have ever been in. After finding a pay phone to call my parents and check in on our dog, we were quickly on our way again.

After that, the drive to Dodgeville was pretty uneventful. The fog hung on tight for another hour and then was finally behind us. After two hours, the terrain was getting more and more hilly and uneven until we began to see places where our road had been driven through hillsides that were cut away to make room for it. This was looking familiar from the trip that farm_cat and I took out this way to go backpacking several years ago.

On our last southbound leg of the trip, I started scanning the radio and found some techno to keep me company. Ever since taking classes at New Horizons in Michigan, I've loved listening to techno while driving at night. There was a great program on on the way home from school and the fact that I felt like I was in a Playstation racing game kept me awake on the drive.

The first we saw of the Don Q Inn, when we pulled in at about nine-thirty, was the tail fin of the giant Boeing C-97 that sits in front of the building proper, a stylized Q emblazoned proudly thereon. Andrea had woken up and we were both bouncing in our seats at the thought of finally being there!

We parked, went inside, and got our keys. While at the front desk, I looked around at the mammoth circular fireplace, surrounded by old barber's chairs, that dominated the lobby. The whole place felt very kitschy and seventies. In fact, our room keys were honest to goodness, stick them in a cylinder and turn them, keys. This pleased me.

We explored the inn a little bit, seeing the second floor of the lobby, looking at the pool and jacuzzi, and going down to look at the tunnel in the basement that connects to the adjoining restaurant, but left more in depth touring for the 'morrow and shortly went back to our room.

I now know what it's like to have a bathtub that's actually big enough for me. In fact, the bathtub in our room, made from a three hundred gallon copper cheese vat, was so big that we could sit down inside of it facing each other in comfort, and the rim of the thing reached up and over our heads. That's a bathtub! I was slightly disappointed that the bathtub wasn't a hot tub; I had somehow gotten the idea that it was. But it was a minor disappointment only.

We started the tub filling (it swiftly became clear that it was going to take a while) and looked at the rest of our room. We were in the room called The Swinger. It was called this because the bed is suspended from the ceiling by four large chains at the corners. I jumped on and wiggled my arms back and forth, making it sway from side to side. This would be fun! Then I looked up; the ceiling over the bed was mirrored. Looking over to the other side of the room, I realized that the ceiling over the bathtub was mirrored as well. Wow!

I was endlessly fascinated by the mirrored ceilings during our stay there. Apart from the obvious uses (which we certainly didn't refrain from exploring), I was continually lying on the bed in different positions and looking up at the mirror. I'd never managed to see myself from a lot of those angles before! As I told Andrea, I've decided that I definitely need to employ some amount of the mirrored glass tiles I have to mirror the ceiling over our bed. I'm already running through a few different ways to do it in my head.

What else? Oh yes! The bathroom, though lacking a shower to our great surprise (we ended up sitting in the bathtub under the faucet and washing that way since it was plenty deep), had a toilet and another porcelain device whose function was unknown to me. It was an oblong bowl with a little control valve on one end and hot and cold water controls on the wall in front of it. Andrea saw it and exclaimed that we had a bidet. Oh, ok! I'd never seen one before! Yes, much like the mirrored ceilings, after trying it out, I've decided that I need one of those too.

So, after a nice long bath, we eventually got to sleep and woke up early the next morning for the continental breakfast in the lobby. This consisted of a countertop arrayed with bagels, french toast, English muffins, and a few varieties of fruit. We picked out our comestibles and sat down at a table under a window on the back wall of the lobby. We discussed plans for the day, and decided that the first thing we were going to do was to visit The Forevertron. I was happy to note, as we walked out the door, that there were no brochures or fliers or advertisements of any kind for the thing; you just had to know about it. Hopefully that would make for fewer people.

We climbed into the trucklet and were on our way. It was a drive of about an hour. Well, for normal people. I, on the other hand, had to pull off to the side of the road when we drove by a sandstone cliff face that had an entrance way set into it. "A cave!"

I walked a hundred yards back along the road to where I'd seen the doorway and commenced to climb up the forty-five degree angle of the earth embankment at its base. Using bits of shrub and the occasional small tree as hand holds, I got up to a small flat shelf running most of the length of the bluff. There along it were two entranceways. They turned out to be portals to two different rooms of a small cave. One room had at some point had it's floor leveled off with large blocks of some kind. The other one was a natural floor, but level with the blocks in the first room. There was little to see but graffiti, scores of niches carved into the sandstone by bored teenagers, and the remains of a fire or two, so after looking for a way further up the bluff (not possible at the time due to snow and ice) I scuttled back down to the truck that Andrea had helpfully driven back around to the street directly below.

While again on the way, we spotted a big brown sign on the shoulder. "A historical marker!" we shouted. Of course we had to drive a short length off the road to a small gravel patch overlooking a river. We read the sign (something about American soldiers having crossed the river there in pursuit of Black Hawk) and tried to turn around. Oops; the coating of ice slanted down toward the drop to the river and made purchase a very questionable matter. Fortunately there was a ridge around the patch to keep us from sliding all the way into the river, but the truck slid down toward the low spot and it quickly became apparent that we could not get it back out under its own power.

The gradient was very shallow and the wet ice was nearly frictionless; I figured that if I could just get some traction myself, I could push it back out of the divot. With the truck in reverse and Andrea ready to open the throttle, I dug my feet into a snowbank and pushed. Success! I managed to fall over as the truck slid up to a position that it could actually move from and spend the next couple of hours with a very wet right leg, but I'll take that over getting stranded and hiking to the next pay phone.

Our next adventure of the trip actually happened to be our original destination; the Forevertron and it's associated surplus store. Now, as excited as I was about seeing the world's largest scrap metal sculpture, the store was very nearly just as exciting!. I had no idea what to expect; from my reading I expected it to be a scrap yard. No, this was much better. This was Big!Lots hopped up on some really good crack. From candles, travel razors, and notebooks on one side of the store to rack mount PBX gear and thousand pound pieces of industrial machinery on the other, this place had a mind-boggling variety of wonders. We spent well over an hour looking through and collecting random bits. I passed on a lot of tools at really great prices, telling myself that I should only buy things I have an actual use for.

But, to give you an idea of the range of wares, we found: a candle for our hotel room, a pair of tailor's sheers (only three bucks!), two sets of gold-plated A/V RCA patch cables at three bucks a piece, a rechargeable razor, two grommeters that we found buried under some other stuff (well, we almost bought them but after the guys consulted each other and decided on a price, we decided to pass), and a Rick Wakeman CD. But best of all was the Flight Director navigational compass that I mentioned back when I started. I'd found a whole box of really cheap looking compasses and was going to pick one up to mount to my dashboard, but then Andrea found that beauty and I knew that it was meant to be.

Having put in our time and money in the store proper, Andrea and I asked about seeing the sculpture park in back. "Sure," we were told, "but nobody's shoveled it lately. You'll have to go through the snow." We passed on the offer of a shovel to clear a path ourselves and, after placing our surplus booty in the truck, went back through the store and out the back.

We passed by a graveyard of defunct equipment, including a bright red British police call box (must be a bizzaro Tardis?), on our way through the snow, but it didn't take too much trudging through ankle deep slush before we could see the Forevertron itself. The Forevertron is a difficult thing to put into words, and I wish I had had means for bringing pictures of it with me. It stands about thirty or forty feet tall at it's highest point and is composed of turbines from old power plants, huge ceramic insulating mounts, and thousands of other things that just seemed to lose their form within the mass. The whole thing feels very Victorian, very steampunk, very Jules Verne. That seems to be the feeling that the sculptor, Tom Evers, is going for according the interviews I've read.

Mr Evers' alter-ego, Doctor Evermore, is a turn of the 19th century scientist who is going to project himself into space by riding a beam of electricity and light inside a glass egg. The egg, wrapped in coppery metal tendrils, is the highest point of the Forevertron and of the sculpture park, and the rest of the constructions all center, metaphorically, around it. There's the gravity chamber where the doctor will dehydrate himself and become lighter for the trip. There's the pavilion where royalty will watch the egg as it launches into it's journey. There are the numerous birds constructed of discarded horns and other pieces of musical instruments that will herald his departure. There are the listening stations designed to listen to transmissions from the heavens. Everything is constructed with an amazing grace and eloquence. It was simply beautiful.

I am coming back in the Spring. I'm going to bring a camera, and hopefully a posicat. He and I are talking about taking Andrea and going camping out that way, perhaps at Devil's Lake. I think my grandfather would really appreciate it too as a worker of metal himself, but I'm not sure if he's feeling up to going camping these days. I have to call him and tell him about it. I guess there isn't much more that I can say, but the whole experience was fantastic. I'm hoping that next time I'll have a chance to talk to Mr. Evers. Maybe if I call ahead I can arrange something. I can't imagine that someone who can create something of such unusual beauty isn't someone worth talking to.

From there, we decided to drive on north to see Baraboo and find lunch as it was only another fifteen minutes or so north. We decided the House on the Rock would wait 'till later in the afternoon. As it turned out, it would wait until tomorrow. Baraboo was enthralling, and the circus museum wasn't even open!

The whole downtown had a very lefty feel. Proprietors of two shops we visited (a chinese buffet and a jewelery store) were almost certainly family, and there seemed, by the event notices posted on bulletin boards, to be a very visible GLBT community. There was a gorgeous early Rapp and Rapp theatre, the Al Ringling, that has been in continuous operation as a venue for live entertainment since it opened in 1915. I fully intend to come back and see a performance in it some day.

We also spent a while in very pleasant conversation with a bookstore owner. I befriended her dog, an elderly Golden Retriever named Nellie, as we explored her collection and chatted about the differences between Kenosha and Baraboo. She talked about some of the other places she'd lived too, and though I didn't contribute much to the conversation myself, she left a lasting impression on me. She had an unusual wisdom about her that I don't often feel. It seemed fitting that, when I asked about the elegant metal fish that she had under a table in the front of the shop, she confirmed my suspicion that it was one of Tom Evers' creations. He's a good friend of hers, she said.

By the time we left Baraboo to head back to the Don Q, it was getting on to dusk. That didn't keep us from a little more exploring though. We'd seen signs for entrances to something called Natural Bridge State Park both near the beginning of our drive and near the end, so we figured we could find a way to get back by going through it rather than around.

Well, we weren't successful at that (we couldn't seem to find the actual park entrance), but we did have a wonderful time driving along nearly empty roads through wide, snow-covered farmers' fields nestled in open valleys between the region's omnipresent rocky ridges and bluffs. We saw deer; more deer that I'd seen in my entire life up to that point. We kept driving by groups of two here and three there, at the edge of a small wood, or lying in the undergrowth. We were already amazed at our luck when we drove around a corner and came upon one of the most amazing natural scenes I've ever beheld.

We counted as best we could; there were at least forty deer in this field, grazing, walking, keeping lookout for danger, their breath misting upward from their nostrils as they rooted in the snow for food or followed our car with their eyes. We stopped at the side of the road for a quarter of an hour, mesmerized. I felt very excited, and very lucky, to be able to bear witness to so much beauty. It also made me deeply wish, as so much on this trip did, that I had a camera with me. Soon, soon I will have one....

Well, that's about the end of day one and two. I've spent odd moments here and there writing this all week, and it's getting late once again. I'll cover Sunday, including the House on the Rock and the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum, in the next chapter of my vacation story. I imagine I'll have something to say about visiting the pool on Saturday night and grabbing dinner at a local bar too.

'Till next!