Our wonderful site at Blue Mound State Park

Parking

Great roads

Caterpillar

The last site available at Tower Hill State Park

Hiking

Geology

View from Tower Hill

Top of shot tower

Bottom of shot tower

Shot Tunnel

Part of the Wisconsin River

Private Site

Sharp Flower Image

Thomas

Chocolate break

Blue Mound in distance

Scary caterpillar (Imperial Moth - Eacles imperialis)

Read the full story below:

Friday night we drove to Blue Mound State Park. The ranger remembered us from last week, and this week the place was a lot less crowded without a bike race going on. We ended up staying at site number 2, where we had stayed two years ago. It is one of the nicest sites in the park because it's huge, surrounded by trees, and far away from annoying neighbors. It's usually available I think maybe because people don't want to be at the first site in the park because they think they feel a false sense of security from being further in the park. The only disadvantage (and I think this is a disadvantage for the entire park), is that you can hear the highway traffic.

We cooked velveta shells and cheese for dinner, and it was SOOO good I don't think I've ever enjoyed that meal so much before. We also had a couple of island wheat beers along.

Saturday started with a beautiful sunny morning. We set off going down a huge hill, and then went on entirely new roads to us for the rest of our trip. There were lots of huge hills, some that we walked. It was a very nice route with lots of trees intead of boring treeless farmland. We passed the America Players Theatre where they have lots of Shakespeare plays (there were 100s of cars there so there must have been a play going on), and we went past the house on the rock resort with a big golf course. We arrived at Tower Hill state park around 3 or 3:30 PM and got the last site available. After our nice site at Blue Mound, we were a little disappointed about our site that was right on a four way intersection and only had a few trees. A lot of the sites were closed because of flooding earlier this year. We were really tired after sweating and biking up all of those hills (maybe we should start paying the extra price for fancy energy bars and gatorade, because we were depleted of energy). We chilled out in the tent and then we ate a chocolate bar and finally had the energy to go for a hike. We hiked up to the shot tower. This was reconstructed as a historical site. They had a video at the top of the shot tower which explained everything. People used to mine in Wiconsin and then at the shot tower they melted the stuff and threw down little pellets that landed in water at the bottom and hardended into bullets. At the bottom there was still a tunnel we could walk into. It was interesting, and hiking the hills was another great workout.

We went to bed early, but unfornately did not sleep well because of loud people talking well into the night (at one point I looked at my watch and saw it was after 1 AM and these people were talking loud as day....). We didn't make any attempt to be quiet when we got up the next morning.

We set off at 10 AM and were back at Blue Mound by 2. There was the HUGE hill to ride just before the park. Last week we had walked most of it, but this week we seemed to be in much better shape and we biked the entire thing! It was much cooler today but we still got super hot biking up for so long.

Megan found a caterpillar on the road that Thomas is very excited about. Unfortunately, it's not the Luna Moth caterpillar that he thought it might be.

Also, we heard a lot of Barred Owls and Great Horned Owls and saw a lot of wooly bear caterpillars. Thomas found an Orange Dog at Tower Hill too and had it stretch out its red fork.

We rode our bikes for 4 hours and 39 minutes total this weekend, went 39.1 miles, at 8.3 mph average.

Hopefully we can continue with more trips before it gets too cold or rainy.