LaCrosse

The question I posted last week was-
What beauty can I behold?

We went on a quick little getaway last weekend, him and I. Took our little dog too.
First we headed up to our favorite place Devils Lake, Wisconsin.
On the way to Devils Lake we stop at our favorite rest stop in Janesville.
We are both creatures of habit, him and I.
We know what we like and we like what we know.
Stopped there to pee, let the dog go potty, and fuel up the truck.
He grabs a diet Coke, I grab a cold Starbucks Frappucinno and we're off again.
Is there beauty in any of that?
Probably not but it did feel good to pee after 2 hours of driving....

The scenery flying by the truck windows is mostly cornfields.
There is the occasional farm or pasture full of cows or pigs...smelly, but not beautiful.
I start noticing wild flowers by the side of the road.
Pink tufted twisted weeds (the pink was exquisite), purple daisy type flowers,
pink Clover, green and white Queen Ann's Lace, iridescent grasses, yellow flowers in all shapes and sizes.
The sky is a blue that I've not seen before...so bright and clear and nary a white cloud to be seen.

We make our way to the shit box town of Ontario, Wisconsin.
Sorry but that is an apt description right there.
Just outside of shit box Ontario is a winding road that leads to an Amish village.
And by winding road I mean steep, switchback, nausea inducing roads.
Half way up the dog sits up in her car seat and gives me a look that I interpret as:
"I'm getting real dizzy and gonna vomit in a second"
Truth be told, him and I feel a little bit queasy ourselves...these roads are not for the feint of heart.
How in the world do the Amish get their horse and buggies up and down these roads??

Once we get to the top rise, we enter into Amish territory.
It's then I realize that the Amish rarely go up or down these paved switch back roads.
As there are no blacktop roads up here at the top, only gently rolling hills and gravel roads.

We see horse and buggies with the ever present orange triangle attached to the back sitting in driveways and in front of really clean barns.
There is a  young teenage boy on the road up ahead, coming towards us, driving his little buggy faster than seems safe on this road.
We see a young girl, so young!! driving a team of draft horses by herself, while a man (her father?) tosses bales of hay onto the back of their wagon.
We see house after house, all white clapboard with black shutters exclusively.
They all appear to be three level houses with outside decks on all levels along with lots of open windows and huge hanging baskets of flowers in white, pink and purple.
I see quite a few rather large kitchen gardens and a lots of wash hanging on clotheslines.
Rounding one bend in the road we come upon what appears to be an 8 year old blond boy, walking by hisself, barefoot, down the dusting gravel road.
He is wearing the typical Amish straw hat, black pants and a teal colored button down shirt.
He waves at us.
Other than that teenage boy at the beginning, and the small family working in their field, he is the only other person we have seen up here. And he's the only one that waves at us.

Coming down off of their, uh...mountain, is a lot easier than going up.
Pretty soon we are zipping down another paved blacktop highway heading to LaCrosse.
The scenery seems typical; pastureland, farms, Historical Markers, Rest Stops.
We see hills and bridges and bodies of water we can't identify, lakes, rivers, streams.
Five hours later LaCrosse appears on the horizon in front of us.
One minute we were driving down a country road, then BAM..there is the town of LaCrosse.
It is beautiful here. It appears clean. It seems uncrowded. We found our hotel without a hitch.
The bed was really comfy and there was a nice green grass area out back for walking the dog.
We were only there for the night but I can already tell you that we will come back again some day.

This seems like a long post about nothing in particular but our small trip to Wisconsin.
Maybe the real beauty was that we arrived to our destination safely, we arrived back home safely,  our dog appeared to like traveling and DID NOT actually throw up on those winding Amish roads.
Maybe the beauty was in the fact that we enjoyed each others company, the hotel was more than we had hoped for, and the passing scenery on The River Road that we took home was amazing.
Rock outcroppings, parts of the Mississippi River seen through lots of green trees and forested lands.
I wished we had taken more pictures.
We were so in awe of what we were seeing and our surroundings that neither one of us thought to even take the camera out of its bag.
Maybe there's a certain type of beauty in that too though.
At least it gives us a decent excuse to go back.

Thanks for reading,
Love, Lolly