We live in a beautiful state. Not to go all Chamber of Commerce on everybody or anything, but we do. I’ve had every opportunity to enjoy that over the last week, and now that I’m home, I find myself picturing places we went in my head at the drop of a feather.
I’ve ridden Interstate 90 to the Great River, and as interstates go, there are worse drives, but we got on the road early enough that we didn’t have to hurry, so we took Highway 14 instead. This kind road meanders through plentiful Wisconsin farm country, about which David remarked, “When they want to put rural America in movies, this is what they want it to look like.”
We then turned north on 35, also known as the Great River Road. Be careful in La Crosse; they’ve torn 35 up and it’s a bit of a white-knuckle drive. We made it nonetheless, and stopped at a little Tex-Mex place in Onalaska for lunch before going on. David the conscientious navigator called off the small towns as we got to them.
We were making fine time, so we decided to stop near Trempeleau at Perrot State Park. We bought our day sticker (if we keep up this day-tripping business, we may have to pick up a yearly one!), parked the car, wandered toward the river to look at the burial mounds—and were greeted by a blue grosbeak, large as life and twice as blue.
Essaying the Perrot Ridge Trail, I learned that I ought to be doing more time on a Stairmaster. The steep climb was manageable, not to mention absolutely gorgeous in a ferny, verdant sort of way, but we had to stop a few times. Once we stopped for quite a different reason: to gawk at a great big pileated woodpecker, a rare and most welcome sight. The top of the trail is the big reward, a brilliant view of the river valley; we saw what I think was a tugboat sans payload churning upriver, but I assure you, the river traffic is not the point. I then proved why David was navigating the car trip, turning us the wrong way at a trail junction, so that we walked half the Reed’s Run trail back to the start of the Perrot Ridge Trail instead of going directly down. Stupid but harmless; to avoid doing it yourself, turn right, not left, at the split. (Wisconsin DNR: I quite understand that it’s difficult to put a sign there without ruining the view, but I can’t be the only person guilty of this particular stupid. Please fix?) Perrot State Park is a stunning place. I’m glad we have such places in our state.
We found the turnoff to our boat provider, but it was too early to board, so we drove on to little bi-level Alma in a none-too-hopeful search for food. (Rural Wisconsin tends toward bar-and-grille food, which is fine for most, but generally unlucky for vegetarians. La Crosse is a culinary wasteland.)
As luck would have it, though, Alma boasts Kate and Gracie’s, which is a fantastic establishment I can’t recommend highly enough. We had a little bit of this and that, to the covert amusement of our kind and efficient server. The capellini with honey-ginger sauce was a standout; I’d gank that recipe in a hot minute. The applesauce cake was just about as good as mine, and I make quite a tasty applesauce cake if I do say so myself. Stop in, if you’re in the area! You won’t regret it.
Happily refreshed, we made our way back to the marina and were shown our houseboat. These things are immense, quite comfortable, and appallingly civilized. It’s a little like having an expensive hotel room, minus the hotel, in the middle of nowhere. No room service, but an ensuite kitchen, and boy are the beds comfy.
There’s just one problem with the things. Ford Prefect said of a particular model of spaceship: “Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.” That about covers it. It doesn’t help that the steering wheel is a Donald Norman disaster, a metal wheel that turns an arbitrary five revolutions, doesn’t offer immediate feedback about where the propeller actually is, and doesn’t have the tug-toward-straight that a car steering wheel does. A steering-stick travelling in a 180-degree arc would be a much novice-friendlier device. Sure, it’s not traditional, but (are you listening, libraries?) sometimes traditions (like, ahem, left-anchored title searches) were developed under conditions and constraints that no longer obtain, and jettisoning those traditions would greatly assist folks just trying to get some use out of the object in question.
The Mississippi doesn’t have moons of Jaglan Beta to smash into, but it does have barges, wing dams, locks-and-dams with huge do-not-go-here—no-really-don’t areas, and similar hazards. There is a single guaranteed-navigable “channel” marked by buoys (red for the Wisconsin side of the river, green for the Minnesota); stray out of it at your hazard. Then try to cope with all this in a thing that steers like a cow.
We opted out.
We pretty much stayed in the nice little cove they left us in after our largely unsuccessful “shakedown cruise.” We tromped over the island, finding orioles and warblers (yellow, Blackburnian, and palm), red-bellied woodpeckers and flycatchers. (We also picked up and properly disposed of quite a bit of trash, much of it left by fishermen, to judge from the nightcrawler boxes.) We sat up top with our binoculars to watch herons and eagles and vultures fly by, and the incidental clouds make patterns on the bluffs opposite; one morning, an immature bald eagle sailed in and sat in a tree across the cove for half an hour. In the mornings and the evenings, we watched the little spotted sandpipers fly in to do their bob-tailed dance with the shoreline. We built sand castles (and sand ziggurats, and Aztec sand pyramids, and sand Great Walls). We dined on roasted CSA vegetables, mostly. We went to bed shortly after sunset, and woke up to see the moon shining on the water, and felt marvelously decadent about rolling out of bed at seven-thirty because the sun had risen two hours previous. The morning we left, we found that a great blue heron had left spiky heron-tracks not six feet from our boat.
It was grand. Not what either of us was expecting, but grand nonetheless. “Is that your interesting bug?” I asked David, pointing—and a purple martin nabbed it out of the air that very second. Strolling across the dunes, we instinctively ducked as an immense adult bald eagle floated ten feet overhead, never so glad as then not to be preferred eagle-food.
On the way home, we stopped at Trempeleau National Wildlife Preserve, greeted by a friendly rose-breasted grosbeak and a wary great blue heron stalking brunch in a reedy pool. Walking the Prairie View Trail turned up a wealth of flowers and meadowlarks and buzzy phoebes, as well as another eagle young’un. Another trail alongside the Mis
I don’t think I need to do the houseboat thing again…
… but…
… I hear there are interesting ways to canoe the Wisconsin River.