Oshkosh
One of the nice things about this trip was that plans were pretty loose. I used to be a plan-it-to-the-gills anal-retentive, but I am learning.
So on Monday we went to Oshkosh, since it appears to be the most happening of the Lake Winnebago cities. We had a bit of trouble avoiding Memorial Day parades on the way out of Appleton, but after a few white-knuckle moments we were back on the nice one-lane state and county roads.
Oshkosh is indeed a nice little burg. Reminds me of Bloomington, if you add in the lake, and I liked Bloomington a lot. When I’m back on the job market after library school, I may well seek out college towns of this general description. I’ve no objection to Madison-type cities, but I do love smaller towns as long as they’re not hopelessly conservative.
We drove to the north end of Menominee Park, walked around a bit, said “awwwwww” at some very young baby ducklings, and then drove back to the south end where all the action is. Early as it was, the place was filling with joggers and proto-picnickers and whathaveyou. Didn’t seem to bother the plovers and killdeers, though, nor the geese and their goslings.
At eleven the boating station opened up, and we rented an aquabike on a whim. This is an odd-looking contraption with three big hollow wheels, the two back wheels being ridged so that they propel the thing a la paddle-wheelers. It’s dead easy to use, less confining than a paddle boat (and you get to sit close together with your co-biker, which I found quite pleasant, thank you).
We pedal-paddled past a half-submerged log that turned out to have a turtle on it. Turtle blinked at us, turned his head, considered dropping off into the lake—but we stopped a little way away from him, and he only waved a friendly if rather oddly-shaped paw at us and went back to his sunning.
There’s a large orange-brown fish in Wisconsin that gets a kick out of coming to the surface of the water and thrashing about a bit. David and I have called them “water monsters” for years, because we didn’t (still don’t) know what they were, and because the thrashing brought to mind bad Loch Ness Monster moments.
We had a couple of water monsters surface right under our front wheel. We could have reached down and grabbed them. Wow. Coolness. No monsters were damaged in the making of this blog. They swam with us a bit and went under again.
After we gave the bike back, we went into the little zoo. There’s a quite nice wolf habitat with three inhabitants, the world’s only brachiating porcupine, the inevitable prairie-dog town… but the fun part is the petting zoo, stocked by a couple of local farms.
They had a pair of the sweetest-tempered burros you could ever wish for. Now, I like burros on general principles, but these were exceptionally nice animals. One walked up to me to be petted despite perfect awareness I hadn’t any food for him. So I scratched his wiry-haired forehead and rubbed his back for him, and he stood quietly and let me.
I want a burro, I do. Do you think I could keep one in the back yard?
The drive to Stevens Point (during which I magically avoided getting us lost, despite roadwork-related detours) took us through more of the farm country we’d gotten used to from previous days’ travel. Plenty of placid cows, red silos, and plowed cornfields.
We didn’t feel like driving to dinner, so it was our good luck to find a Japanese place across the street from our hotel that served vegetable sushi of various sorts. Not up to Wasabi standards, but quite good nonetheless.