Lemon Pound Cake Breakfast at our Mirror Lake State Park Campsite.
Lunch at the Dell Creek Wildlife Area.
Thomas loved the dragon flies here.
Escaping from the rain at a family reunion at Bass Hollow.
Escaping from a second rain storm in the pit toilet at Stewart's Chapel.
Finally, the sun returned.
You can see the storm that passed over us.
Our beautiful site at Elroy Campground (we actually had the entire campground to ourselves).
We brought Pabst and it had stayed cool!
Vodka Pasta.
Good morning.
We decided to have breakfast in the shelter since it was so windy and cloudy we thought it might rain.
We stopped at Stewart's Chapel for lunch. This time it wasn't raining.
We stopped in Reedsburg on the way back. Although it was cloudy and windy all day, it only sprinkled a little.
Read the full story below:
Friday we drove to Mirror Lake State Park and camped next to some loud drunk people. We took a short hike to Mirror Lake, got our feet wet on the trails (there must have been a big rain storm before we arrived), and ran into a deer hiking. We enjoyed some Pabst and Megan got hundreds of mosquito bites on my feet.
We went to bed early and were lucky a big rain storm must have sent the loud drunk people to bed early, so we got a good night's sleep.
We got permission to leave our car at the park for Saturday night although we wouldn't be there, and we set off for Elroy at 10:30 AM. It was very hot and sunny, and Thomas felt like the conditions would be ideal for giving him heat stroke.
We stopped at a pretty wildlife area on a bridge over a creek for lunch (hummus and pita). Thomas was impressed by the bright green dragon flies near the creek.
We continued on our trip, but could see a huge storm in the distance. We thought maybe we could outbike it, but suddenly ran into an area with a picnic shelter, water, toilets, and a lot of tents set up. We stopped there, and soon enough it started pouring and there was even some loud thunder and lightening. The temperature dropped dramatically, and Thomas no longer felt at risk for heat stroke. There was a group of local people who had the shelter reserved for a family reuion, and some of the old guys were telling us how they had shot 9 rattle snakes just up the road as kids. There was a Eastern Wood-Pewee in the shelter too (Thomas has confirmed this with his bird book).
After an hour or so, we continued on. It was sunny and the steamy road started to be dry, and then we saw some huge storm clouds. We decided to see if the chapel we were biking by happened to be unlocked so we could use it for shelter. The front and back door were locked, but the pit toilet was unlocked! We fit both of our bikes in there, and hung out until the showers passed by. The toilet wasn't too unbearble, it didn't smell and I don't think it was used much since the toilet paper seemed to have a lot of bugs on it eating it.
Soon the sun came out and we went on our way. There was a HUGE hill we had to climb, with the wind against us, so we ended up hiking it (which was also great excercise). We arrived at the campground before dark. There was a flooded tunnel we had to go through to get the campground, and I guess because of the flood might have been why no one else was there. There weren't even any registration envelopes left for us to pay for our site.
We had a beautiful site, and the entire campground to ourselves. Thomas enjoyed the young Cardinals he heard practicing their songs. We went to bed early, and woke up to very windy conditions with threatening clouds. We left at about 9:30 AM, and pretty much the entire day was very windy and it kept looking like it was going to rain, but only sprinkled a little. We stopped at the Chapel again to eat lunch on the back stairs. We stopped at the shelter with the family reunion and a different set of people were meeting there today. They were very friendly as well.
We stopped in the small town of Reedsburg on our way back, and arrived at our car at 3:30 PM. We biked a total of 83.5 miles at 9 mph, and spent 9 hours and 11 minutes on our butts on our bikes.