The RN Travelogue

At first, I was struggling trying to entertain myself here, as forms of entertainment are much more subtle than in New England. When we were in Connecticut, if I had a day off where I didn't have anything planned, then I could just jump on the train and head into NYC. Here it isn't that simple. For the first week or so, I was really having a hard time figuring out fun things to do.

Being in Madison itself has taken some time to get used to. Again, maybe that has a lot to do with the withdrawal symptoms I was feeling after leaving the very urban Connecticut. While Madison is quite a relaxed and interesting city, it just doesn't have that intense feel like we'd been experiencing all summer. There are a lot of nice parks, great neighborhoods for walking and people-watching, and great food and drinks here, but I have still had to get used to the area.

Actually, I have mostly focused on the surrounding areas so far. I always like to check out the surrounding areas of places I visit. I've done a fair amount of that in the last couple of weeks, both alone and with Jess. (We haven't had the most desirably aligned schedules here).

I've taken several photography field trips to visit the little towns that surround Madison. The farms here are really interesting. They have a very old-fashioned appearance, with big red barns and other structures surrounded by fields and fields of corn and other crops. This state is most certainly an agricultural based one, with its wide swaths of landscape covered by farm after farm. There are rolling hills and surrounding forests, and lots of lakes and ponds and rivers. I've taken a lot of rural landscape photos recently, the big red barns and accompanying silos a favorite subject out here. That's been fun.

Speaking of photography field trips, I made a day trip to Milwaukee, to walk around in the city center. That was surprisingly nice. I guess I had expected a city a little more rough around the edges. Perhaps the periphery of the city is a little rougher, since this is a big industrial city. Still, the center itself was very nice. The business district was more like a state capital than Madison's; in fact, for Coloradoans, a fair comparison of cities would be to say that Madison is like Fort Collins while Milwaukee is more like Denver. Around the business district, there were a lot of neighborhoods of older buildings, many with very interesting post-industrial bricked architecture. It seems like there were harder times for the city, but it has gone through extensive renovations, where the old factory-type buildings were reworked into quirky neighborhoods of shops and apartments. The Menomonee River runs through the center, and a long boardwalk follows much of its length through the center, and of course the city sits on Lake Michigan, so there is the lakefront as well. All in all, I rather enjoyed my day in Milwaukee, and it's only an hour and a half drive from Madison.

Besides getting out of town for photo shoots, I have also become more active in fishing, this area being quite a good place for that. Anybody who has fished with me knows that I suffer from a genetic malfunction that forces me to suffer from the chronic inability to actually catch anything from a body of water besides rocks, overhanging branches, and an occasional confused catfish. This is true no matter which body of water I am fishing in, or for what that I am fishing for, or which equipment I am using. Still, I keep on trying.

In Connecticut, I fished off the piers and docks regularly, at least once a week. The fact that I caught a single striper in the entire three months did nothing to persuade me to not fish. Here I have had a variety of fishing experience, all of which have one thing in common, the number of fish I ended up with. Which is zero. For example, I read that there are all these salmon running up the rivers from Lake Michigan, so naturally I immediately made plans to drive to the lake and try my luck. It was a humiliating experience, of course. I didn't get off as early as planned, and hit Milwaukee at 7 am, which is pretty much rush hour. A bit frazzled, but still excited, I arrived in a little town called Racine in between Chicago and Milwaukee, and hit the Root River, ready to bring home some salmon.

Within 45 minutes of first tossing a lure into the river, I had not only lost all eight of the spoons that I had brought along to the rocks, but I had snapped the end of my pole off succeeding in retrieving my last spoon so successfully that I hit the tree behind me. After raging in my car for a good ten minutes, I decided that the long drive demanded a second attempt, so I headed off to Dick's to buy more lure and a new tip. Upon resuming my fishing, I was able to avoid most of the rocks, but found myself watching these guys pulling enormous salmon all around me, and not even getting a nibble myself. A shady looking Russian nearby suddenly produced a huge twenty-pound salmon, but I still think that he had it frozen in his bag and just pulled it out when I wasn't looking, because it was as stiff as a board and I think I would have noticed him bringing something of that size to the shore. Still, he wanted me take a bunch of pictures, and he called a buddy to come and see the fish he'd caught. Then, with disdain that only a Russian can muster, he looked down his nose at me and my little pole and informed me that I'd never catch a fish like his with a pole like that.

Feeling sorry for myself, I went up above the dam where everyone was corralling their salmon and pulled out a sorry looking catfish. When I returned to my spot below the dam, a lady with two kids had arrived, and she told me that she was fishing with salmon eggs. So, I grabbed my gear and headed back to Dick's, to buy lots and lots of salmon eggs, as well as 16-lb fishing line for the expected boon of salmon I figured I would catch, now that I knew what others were using. Back at the river, though, I had the same results, and it was only later that I realized that everyone was fishing that particular day with flies, even guys with normal poles, who would just tie a fly onto the end of their line and flop them out. They literally stood in a line in the river, pulling one salmon after another, and no lure that I had nor the six varieties of salmon eggs that I'd purchased could convince the salmon to ignore the idiots standing in the river with flies tied to the ends of their lure poles. I literally stayed all day, up until 6 pm, and still I walked away with nothing but a bunch of new gear and bait.

I've tried a number of other lakes and ponds and rivers in the area, and invariably I've gotten the same results. I did catch a 21-inch walleye, but not knowing what it was or how tasty it apparently is, I threw it back. This morning I went off to a trout stream heralded as one of the top in the nation, since tomorrow is the last day of trout season this year. I did get two nice hits, where the fish jumped out of the water, but I couldn't bring them in, so I was reduced to stopping by a lake and throwing worms out to two-inch blue-gills. There's nothing particularly satisfying about those.

At any rate, I've spent a fair amount of time between photography and fishing. Of course Jess and I have gone on little day trips together. We went hiking in a very nice little state park called Devil's Lake. That day we also stopped by a little vineyard and winery called the Wollersheim Winery in Sauk City, which is in the general area. We ended up buying a case of wine there, after thoroughly enjoying their tasting. Last week, we drove up for an overnight trip to Door County, which is a terrific part of Wisconsin. I'm going to write a whole entry about that.

Well, it's a nice evening outside. Perhaps I will go fishing.

Until next time, be safe.