Prairie du Chien Weekend

This past weekend we were all over the danged place. Luckily, it didn't seem like it. I'll give you the condensed version: Cale and I drove out to Gunnar and Kelly's farm for the weekend on Friday night. We went for a road ride with a bunch of guys from Prairie du Chien Saturday morning, ate breakfast, shot an AR15 rifle, went antiquing and then went for dinner at Gunnar's mom's house. On the way back home Sunday, we stopped to see my parents, then rode at Blue Mound State Park and had dinner with my cousin Shannon and Darwin at a Japanese place in Madison.

Sat morning road ride in the country started from the Prairie Peddler. A beautiful ride with some hills that made me heave a sigh when I saw what I was in for. One was a sustained 20% grade, as I heard it told! Below is a shot of the scenery and the guy who took us on the long/tough version of the ride after we split from the main group. On the way back into town, I got up to 50mph down one hill! It didn't feel like it at all.





Since we were away from the stinking lake, it was actually warm out. After getting back from the ride, we had breakfast outside. Cale had a Mike's Hard Lemonade with breakfast- which is 'just like juice!' ...but with alcohol and carbonation.



After breakfast, Kelly and I went antiquing in Iowa. Funniest thing- in most of the places we went into, they had boxes of VHS tapes. Apparently they're antiques now!? I guess they just can't figure out where else to sell them. How bad is it when you can't figure out where to sell something?



After an afternoon of antiquing we all had to do something manly, so Gunnar broke out his AR15, which is a gun modeled after an assault rifle, but commercially produced and available to civilians. Plus, it's like, all black and really wicked looking. Believe it or not, that's me in the photos- I got most of my hair lobbed off on Wednesday.





On the way back to Milwaukee on Sunday, we stopped off at Blue Mounds and went out for a lap. Very technical, but not quite as terrible as I remembered it. Then again, it's been two years, and I was brand spankin' new to mountain biking the first time I tried it. My hand (the one I maybe broke) felt OK after warming up a little bit. I wish it would hurry up and heal. I've taken a good amount of time off of mountain biking to try to give it time.





Anyhow, we changed and then had dinner in Madison with my cousin Shannon and her husband Darwin. It was delicious! We went to a Japanese restaurant and I took the easy way out with a chicken dish, but the sushi was great. I'm usually not a huge sushi fan, but this stuff really rang my bell. Yum. Well, that wrapped up the weekend. We pretty much dumped our bags (some of which are still hanging out, actually...) and crawled into bed.