Washington Island, Ho!

Tomorrow morning we leave for Washington Island, off of Door County. Today I spent most of the day running errands in preparation for our trip. I went to Baraboo and bought a tent at the end of season clearance at Farm and Fleet because mom and dad's tent has a broken shock cord and bent pegs. I went to Aldi to get some groceries - some foods that could be made on a fire.

When I got home, I noticed our Smokey Joe grill had developed a hole in it. I went to the hardware store to buy a small tabletop grill and lighter fluid.

We were going to take the bicycles along, but I strapped the bicycle carrier on the car and discovered that it scratched the paint on the car. It remains to be seen if we can figure out a way to bring the bikes without damaging the car. It would be nice to use the bicycles and bike rack for their intended purpose at least once a year.

I packed the car up with supplies and gear and firewood and hopefully tomorrow we'll be able to make an early start of it.

Cookie time

Today I made some whole wheat - oatmeal chocolate chippers to assuage my cookie craving.

Labor Day weekend plans

Today I made some reservations for the weekend. We booked a campsite in Door County on Washington Island

Here are a couple of photos of Ned being his usual goofy self.

Visiting the crane foundation with Barb and Tom

We visited the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo with Barb and Tom, who were visiting from Baltimore. Here is one of the whoopers in their beautiful enclosure. Ani forgot to bring his camera with the telephoto lens, so this shot is a distant one taken with the Fuji from across the marsh.

Ani learns some new photoshop tricks

This is done with a "graduated mask"

Ned Kittaya colonizes Ani's desk

Ned shows the best way to use a CD.

Indian Railways ticket booking - or not!

We have spent the entire evening today trying to book train tickets for our Indian trip. No thanks to the Indian Railways online ticket booking site, of course, because it only operates part of the day. Now we are able to log on during the correct window of opportunity, but we still can't get anywhere.

It appears that they only accept credit cards of Indian origin, among other options such as direct transfer from an Indian bank account and an Indian cash card which is impossible to obtain as all of the "buy now" links on the website are dead. We are trying to use the ICICI gateway with our card, but it says there is an error in communication and that we are trying to book outside of the 60-day ticketing interval (we aren't).

We will try later tonight and see if that makes any difference.

So much for the explosion of Indian e-commerce.

Here's a photo of some mystery lilies and a yellow and red canna from my garden.

Countryside photos

We went to Mile Road near Rock Springs this weekend to take some scenic photos

Pewitt's Nest

We took a small hike through Pewitt's Nest, a state of Wisconsin "Natural Area", this weekend. It's been recently opened up to the public. It features 4-5 class III-IV rapids in a 60' slot canyon - quite an unusual feature in Southwestern Wisconsin. There was a family there who were swimming the pools and scaling the waterfalls with great delight on the sticky day.

Cannas are blooming

The canna lilies I wintered over in the house last year are doing well. They are starting to bloom and are some of the only color in the garden now, alongside the phlox.

Colleen takes a walk

Colleen enjoys a walk around Watertown.