Brother and sister-in-law, Dan and Cary, were in Milwaukee for a big reunion of the Elks Club Band, in which Cary played sax during late high school and college years. Following the reunion they joined us in Ripon for four days. It just happened to be the week of the annual EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) convention, so we spent a day in Oshkosh seeing all kinds of interesting planes and meeting folks that come faithfully every year to this huge event. During the last week in July, Oshkosh becomes the busiest airport in the world! The area hotels and the dorms at UW-Oshkosh and Ripon College are always full. People rent their homes and take in borders. And then there are the hundreds of campers. That could be an RV, a tent, or a pop-up pitched beside an airplane in an open field among hundreds of others. This was the first time Bill and I have actually paid admission and attended the event, though we participate in a sense each year because the landing pattern includes the water tower on the hill behind our house. It's so good to have visitors from out of town so we can see the local sights ourselves. Here's the C5A cargo plane just after it landed. The big planes were opened for visitors to go inside.
On Wednesday we went to the Horicon Marsh, one of the largest wetland preserves in the country. From Blue Heron Landing we took a guided pontoon boat tour and saw turtles, a mink, many great blue herons, cormorants, a muskrat swimming with a lily pad in its mouth, gulls, green herons, and all sorts of smaller birds.
Thursday we spent the day in Ripon, visiting the Little White Schoolhouse that was the birthplace of the Republican Party, the Ripon Historical Society, Ripon College, and the walking/driving tour of the residences in the National Historic District. Bill has been very involved in the restoration of the Little White Schoolhouse and we both spend a lot of volunteer hours on Historical Society work.
Dan and Cary left Thursday afternoon in order to eat at Cary's high school favorite restaurant in Milwaukee, Mama Mia's. Cary's memories of Mama's butter-soaked garlic bread sticks have become larger than life. Cary phoned, with butter dripping down her arm, to say that the bread sticks continue to live up to the fantasy. The flight back to Dan and Cary's summer home in Colorado was early Friday morning.
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