Fall is upon us, and it has already been treating me so well.
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| Fall in Wisconsin |
So far this fall, I have already had several camping adventures. A few weekends ago, Jacob and I drove up to Door County to camp for a weekend at Peninsula State Park. I had never been to Door County before, but had heard lots of great things.
Door County was not exactly what I expected. It was very touristy, but in an upscale/wealthy kind of way. There were a lot of like sailing-themed boutiques, nice restaurants, and I was impressed that I didn't see a single chain restaurant. Despite the fact that it turned out to be a persistently rainy weekend, there were a ton of people out and about. Hundreds and hundreds of people in the streets of the downtown areas checking out the shops and restaurants.
Jacob and I got into the campsite Friday late afternoon, and I was astonished at how lovely the site was. There were tons of tall trees but their branches didn't start till quite high up. There wasn't really anything in the way of privacy from other sites, but we didn't really care about that. I recently got a new two-person Marmot tent for us to use and we have used it several times now. It weighs a bit over 5 pounds and is suiting us just fine. Got that set up and we decided to go for a bit of a walk while we had daylight. It hadn't started raining for the weekend yet at this point. We walked to the shore and enjoyed the view of the lake at dusk. We decided to jog/scamper down the rocky shore and see what there was to see along the peninsula. It was tough to jog because the beach was comprised of just big rocks and driftwood. We're frankly lucky neither of us broke an ankle. We saw a ton of seagull feathers and bones. It felt cool and somewhat unexplored. Eventually, we reached a point where we figured we needed to turn around to head back. Instead of backtracking the shore, we decided to try to climb up the short cliffside to go inland a bit and see if we could find a road. We pulled ourselves up by tree branches and roots and continued walking. We were excited to shortly thereafter stumble upon a lighthouse on the peninsula. We walked around it in the lingering light and felt like proper explorers. Then we jogged back to the site.
Earlier in the afternoon, we had scavenged for quite a while in the woods for dead branches and downed wood for the fire, since we hadn't brought any firewood. We had collected enough to burn for a couple hours. We had noticed a fair amount of trash in the woods, which I was certain was the work of raccoons having snatched packaged foods from sites and left the remains in the woods. We got our fire going and set to the task of making dinner, impossible burgers cooked in a pan over the fire. Mind you, at this point it is about 7 o'clock. Jacob's got his headlamp on because it has only just gotten properly dark, but just barely. As we're working on the burgers, all of a sudden Jacob looks back towards the picnic table about 12 feet away and goes "raccoons! The food!" His headlamp illuminated the table. We had a tote bag of dry, nonrefrigerated foods sitting on the picnic table. I am not a camping novice, so I know to put everything in the car overnight so raccoons don't get into it. But it was literally only 7 PM at this point and we were still making our dinner, so of course the stuff was still out. I did not expect raccoons so early. These raccoons were unlike anything I'd ever seen before. First of all, they were literally obese. Huge, rounded bellies. Slow, lumbering walk. And fearless. They didn't care that we were there. I leapt up and tried to scare them off the table, but they didn't give two shits about my existence. I had to stomp on the picnic table itself to make them go away. They made off with a bag of cap'n crunch, spilling half of it on the table and the ground as they made off with the goods. They hurried (as much as they could in their enlarged state) into the woods to enjoy their bounty, while I stood there flabbergasted. They had nibbled into the hamburger buns as well. I swept all the cereal off the table, but there were simply too many little pieces to pick it all up off the ground, so we sat helplessly by the fire while the raccoons soon after came back to finish off the leftovers from the ground. Then, only once they were convinced they'd fully cleaned up, did they head back into the woods.
Apart from the raccoon debacle and the persistent rain, it was a fine trip. It did rain beginning that night and continued through the morning into the day. Jacob and I made an oatmeal dehydrated meal for breakfast and headed out in the car to drive around and see the sights. We went to an overlook and walked around for a bit, and had lunch in town. Again, it was very busy with tourists, every restaurant and shop busy and the sidewalks crowded. Farther out away from town, there were many orchard/pumpkin patch/farm store type places crowded with folks buying the typical fall harvest of fresh apples, pies, caramel, pumpkins, gourds, and squash. We didn't stop at any of those places, although I think it would have been cute if we had.
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| Bones we found on the shore of the peninsula. Ginger's hands for scale. |
We played a few games under Jacob's tarp on the hammock back at the campground, but eventually decided we should cut our losses and head back home early rather than spend another night and day in the rain. It was a little bit discouraging to cut the trip short due to the poor weather, but oh well.
More recently, this weekend, we camped at a campground near Lake Mills. We were staying in the area with some of Jacob's coworkers because they are all cycling fans and Trek headquarters is near there. There was an international cycle cross event hosted there that weekend, so we camped Saturday night and spent Sunday at the races. It was fun camping with a bigger group of people (about 8 people). Jacob and I were the first ones to the campsite that Saturday afternoon, and we spent an hour or so gathering wood for the fire and setting things up. We enjoyed Beyond burgers over the fire and eventually the rest of the group arrived for more foodies and smores. Jacob is not fully vegetarian, but generally eats vegetarian when he eats with me.
I have never camped past September before, to my knowledge, and it was definitely chilly but not miserable. Jacob and I both were bundled up in our separate Kelty sleeping bags, drawstrings pulled tight to bunch the hoods around our faces. I had two sweatshirts on, sweatpants, gloves, a hat, and socks with hand warmers inside them. The handwarmers worked great and stayed warm all night. We didn't have the rain fly on the tent, so that probably let more cold air in, but we had never slept in the tent without the rain fly on, so we were curious to give it a go. Jacob and I both had bizarre dreams, perhaps because of the less-than-ideal sleeping conditions. Our bodies and brains must have been jumbled.
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| View from the tent the morning of October 9th |
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| By the campfire Saturday night |
After some apple cider donuts and pumpkin cheesecake bread for breakfast by the fire, we packed everything up and headed to the cycling event. It was a massive event with people from around the country and racers from around the world. Everybody looked so outdoorsy/hip/cool. There were booths for cycling brands where you could peruse merchandise and fancy bikes. Racers were set up with RVs, trailers, tents with cycling brand and sponsor logos--warming up in the shade on their stationary bikes or hooked up to trainers. As we walked past them, admiring their athleticism and their gear, it felt like they were zoo animals and we were observing them. I think they are kind of used to it. We couldn't help but watch these athletes in awe. The race we observed first that afternoon was the womens'. It was something like an hour or so of intense racing all around the course, up steep hills, around sharp curves, over bumpy rock gardens, and over intentionally placed obstacles. Jacob finished up his mountain biking season about a month ago and has taken up cyclocross in its place, so I recognized the style of racing and the course features from spectating a couple of his cycle cross races.
It was fantastic weather to be outside spectating the races. It was October 9th, and we enjoyed mostly sunny skies and mild weather. I was in a light quarter-zip for most of the time. The unfortunate thing about spectating cyclocross is it requires a lot of moving around (if you want to actually watch different points of the race, anyway). I was getting a little bit irritable with all of the moving around, the back and forth, the backtracking, the indeciveness of where to spectate from. It's hard to do something like that with a larger group of people. I enjoyed the day but was anxious to get home that afternoon, mostly because I had left my newly adopted cat, Columbus, home alone for 27 hours.
Oh my gosh, I literally only just realized that I haven't written about Columbus yet. I had been contemplating getting a pet for a long time. I adopted Columbus from MADACC in Milwaukee about a month ago. He was so scared and traumatized at the shelter. I met with more social, playful cats, but I decided on Columbus because I wanted to adopt a cat that maybe wasn't super adoptable. Columbus is about five years old and had been at the shelter a bit longer than usual, according to the volunteers there. I took him home the same day I met him.
He was terrified to get to my apartment. He managed to slink under cabinet doors and hid behind the washer-dryer unit for nearly four hours. I was terrified of having him back there. First of all, I didn't even know he'd be able to get back there. Then I worried he wouldn't be able to get out. I worried there was stuff back there--cords and god knows what--that he would get into or choke on. I worried he would overheat and dehydrate.
Eventually, after much, much, much coaxing, he came out for water. And pretty much since that time, he's been comfortable. Within 36 hours, he totally transformed into a different cat from the one I met at the shelter. He became very cuddly, playful, and social. He likes to nuzzle my feet and flop down by them to lay his head on them. He enjoys swatting his water out of his bowl and knocking it around so the water sloshes out, much to my chagrin. He enjoys his toys, and has lost all three of his mice toys (I don't have a large apartment, I truly cannot understand where they have gone). He has messed with a couple of my plants, which is unfortunate, but cannot seem to be helped, as the weather has gotten too brisk to keep them on my balcony. He is, overall, a joy to have around. He does get onto the counter tops which bothers me to no end. I have yelled at him and sprayed him with water and chased him off the counter tops more times than I can count.
He is my emotional support animal, and luckily, he provides me emotional support slightly more often than he causes me anxiety. I am learning that cats are pretty self-sufficient and can entertain themselves. It brings me solace that he at least enjoys playing with his toys. He also gets into this bizarre, possessed, psycho-mode where he sprints along the length of the entire apartment, sliding on the wood floors right into the glass balcony door. He always slides into it with a little 'thump.' It clearly doesn't hurt him cause he keeps doing it. He'll jump up and dart his eyes around, poised to pounce as if he's seeing things around him that I can't see. It's so bizarre and I don't understand it, but I just hope he's having fun.
I must leave it at that for now. I am loving fall in Milwaukee so far.
