My So Called Life

Waupaca Camping Park

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I’m writing this is support of my candidate for “best campsite ever”, Waupaca Camping Park.

I have camped all over this great country of ours (well, mostly all over the Midwest) and I would be hard pressed to name a better campsite. There are undoubtedly reasons to camp at other places: some particular item of natural beauty, hiking trails, lake access, etc. But I don’t think you’ll ever find another campsite where the owners are so passionate about their property.

The idea of this post all started when we were camping somewhere else and Sara said, “You know, we were really spoiled by the bathrooms at Waupaca.” (Sara has, by the way, quite literally camped all over this great country of ours, so you’d do worse than to take her recommendation.) It got me thinking about how much better Waupaca is, overall, compared to other places we’ve been.

They clean their bathrooms often. I believe twice a day, but don’t quote me on that. Anyway, the bathrooms are always clean. This can not be overstated. Bad bathrooms / showers are one of the hazards of camping life. State park bathrooms seem to be particularly bad, due to low budget and high usage. Believe me, I would pay a premium for a good bathroom.

Waupaca Camping Park has all the amenities of a good campground: good camp store, swimming pool, playground, game room, laundry, etc. There are lots of trees so sites are obscured from each other. But none of that necessarily sets them above the rest, that just gets them in the conversation for best campground ever. (Actually though, the cleanness of their bathrooms puts them in the top 5% automatically)

There are a few things they do that really put them over the top. First off, there are solar panels on the roof that heat the pool, so the water is never cold (it’s usually around 86 or so). Second off, they have many different types of accommodations to choose from. They have big cabins and small cabins, tent sites and RV sites, permanent sites, sites with a view of the lake, and everything in between. They even have an air-conditioned yurt!

But third off, and most importantly, they just really care about their site. Every year there is new construction somewhere. Either they are installing air conditioners in all the cabins, or they are building a new roof over the bathroom area, creating new patios for the fire pits, etc. This year there was a brand new, enormous (wood! not plastic!) playground area. Every year there is something new. I see them going around to scoop out the fire pits. I see them cleaning the cabins. The owners send us a Christmas card! I’m not joking!

This probably doesn’t sound like much, but I’m telling you, this is the best campsite I have ever been to. If you are looking for a campsite in mid-Wisconsin (almost directly West of Green Bay), then this is the place for you.

If you recall, Evie said, “When I grow up, I’m gonna be a person in charge of Waupaca.” I don’t see how you could come by higher praise than that.

Le sigh

/ Shane / 1 Comment

After I put Evie to bed, I remembered there was some stuff in the laundry that should go in the dryer. Except when I was putting things in the dryer, I saw the dehumidifier needed to be emptied. Except when I was emptying the dehumidifier, I saw the cat litter needed changing. Except when I was taking out the garbage with the cat litter in it, I saw that we forgot to clean up after supper. Ah, finally sitting down to relax…except it’s Thursday night, so when I saw the computer, I remembered I should be working…

Rounding the Lake Part 3: Up in the U.P.

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Next up was the portion of the trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (or the U.P. as it is commonly referred to). Evie had been talking about “the upper peninsula” for weeks at this point, telling everybody she saw that’s where she was going. So I knew this would really be the exciting part of the trip for her.

One of the first things I did on the trip is stop at a shop and try a pasty. Pasties are a big deal up there. They are sort of like a savory pot pie, but very dry inside, not soupy. I went for the traditional beef with rutabaga, which I really liked a lot. Evie had a pizza one which was really delicious, but it was stuffed with cheese and sausage and pepperoni, so how could it not be good? The downside is the heart attack you have afterwards, but you can’t have everything.

In general, the U.P. gave me some flashbacks to when I was little and we used to own a bit of land outside of Wisconsin Dells. Driving around the country side there had the same sort of foresty, nobody’s-around-but-me feeling. This was a good thing.

The other thing about going up North is how ridiculously friendly everybody is! I know this isn’t news to people, but seriously, it is so over the top you would think you were in an SNL skit or something. I’ll give you an example.

There was a group of guys camping next to us. This was like a “guy’s weekend” type deal, with a bunch of guys on a fishing trip. One morning I was taking a shower while the lot of them were in the bathroom. When you get a bunch of guys together, they inevitably start making fun of each other. It’s just what they do. Usually, this good natured ribbing is anything but good natured. It can get pretty nasty.

Not with these guys though. This was the most good natured ribbing I could ever imagine. It redefined good natured. I could barely keep from bursting out in laughter in the shower.

Guy 1: “Got enough shaving cream there, eh?”
Guy 2: “Yeah, I’m gonna shave my back!”
::uproarious laughter::

Guy 2: “Hey, did you bring your swim suit, eh?”
Guy 1: “Yeah, I brought my speedo!”
::uproarious laughter::

Guy 1: “Oh, was that you in there taking that long shower?”
Guy 3: “Yeah…I’ve been in there since 5 a.m.!”
::uproarious laughter::

Seriously, there was absolutely no malice in these guys. These were also the guys who got visibly upset that someone might have played a prank on someone that went on a little too long. I just wanted to pinch their cheeks.

As for what we we actually did while we were up there, we used our campsite as a base of operations and struck out for sites around the area, such as Oswald’s Bear Ranch, Tahquamenon Falls:

and Kitchitikipi spring:

Tahquamenon Falls was pretty cool, but I really liked Kitchitikipi. A water fall looks like what you would expect: a water fall. But kitchitikipi looked like something I never really imagined before, namely, water 50 feet deep that was so crystal clear that you could pick out the one fish in the entire thing.

Orlan brought his speedboat, so Evie and I went for a ride, and Evie got to drive. She was pretty good at steering (as long as you like going in circles), by which I mean if you said, “Go over there,” she would point the boat in that direction. The problem was that she would usually try to do it at about a 90 degree angle, and I think she almost flipped the boat a few times.

Evie had yet another birthday party. It was a good thing too, because she had been complaining all week about how she hadn’t gotten anything she wanted for her birthday. That was because we knew she was going to be getting everything everything she wanted when we got to the U.P. For the record, everything she ever wanted was a basket for her bike, and a yellow raincoat that, “covered [her] bottom” and matching boots. She’s not too hard to please as of yet.

Lisa and Orlan also got Evie a Moose CD, which entered the rotation with Wicked. Every song on the CD features a “moose” singing in a big goofy voice (I’m not sure Evie understands it’s not really a moose), and usually involves some horrible pun on the word moose (there is a whole block of songs about Christ-moose). Naturally, Evie loved it.

Another highlight was watching Evie fish. Tom had gotten her a fishing pole for her birthday, so we went over to Seney Wildlife Refuge, and Evie caught not one, but TWO fish! I couldn’t believe it. I was all prepared to explain to her about how you don’t always catch a fish and within like 5 minutes, she had a fish on the line! Then she caught the second one shortly after that. Needless to say, she had a really good time and probably has an unrealistic view of what fishing is like.

Of course the rest of the trip has more or less been covered. One thing I forgot to mention was Ben driving the 13 wheeler: in his car he also had a wheel chair, a bike, and a tricycle. So if he had to ditch the car, he was going to have a lot of options.

So that was pretty much it. This was the first trip we’ve taken with the digital SLR camera, and I’m ashamed to admit, we took over 800 pictures! According to my quick google search, if those were old school film pictures, it would take about $153 to develop them all (that’s 2010 dollars). So I guess that’s the upside. We haven’t even been able to go through them all ourselves, so I think you’ll have to wait for awhile before we get any uploaded anywhere.

I think that’s it! Already can’t wait for the next vacation!

Rounding the Lake Part 2: On Wisconsin

/ Shane / 2 Comments

So, the first leg of our journey was up through Wisconsin. We wanted to break up the trip as much as we possibly could, so we only drove up to my Grandma’s house the first night. Grandma had already gone up to the reunion, but we weren’t actually at her house very long. We spent most of our time there making cupcakes.

Evie wanted cupcakes for her birthday party, so we needed to make a lot of cupcakes. We didn’t want to make them too far in advance, because we wanted them to be fresh, but we didn’t have time to make them right before we left. So Sara mixed all of the dry ingredients before hand and we finished making them and baking them that night (yes, we did all the dishes!)

This part of the trip kicked off what would be a continuing theme of the trip: every time we stopped anywhere, even for one night, we had to entirely unload everything from the car and reload it the next morning. The problem was that our car was packed to the gills, so removing one piece of the puzzle usually required moving all of the other pieces. Also, it seemed like we always needed like one thing from the one suitcase way in the back. I probably loaded and unloaded the car maybe 10 times.

The next day we managed to make it to the reunion at a respectable time. The food is always my favorite part of the reunion. The fact that some of Grandma’s rhubarb dessert was still left at dinner was a crime against humanity that I did my best to rectify. Our fresh salsa (also made at Grandma’s the night before) seemed to be a hit. We finally broke our string of dishes-to-pass that nobody wanted! It was tasty though, and used a lot of tomatoes up from the garden.

Evie enjoyed the horse-wagon ride, but I think more than that, she just enjoyed playing with her cousins and stuff. She enjoyed playing in the sand and playing the “big dice” life-size board game. Many raffle gifts that were won would turn up again as birthday presents for Evie. Oliver was happy to be passed around to everybody, and everybody seemed pretty happy to have him passed.

We stayed in a hotel by the reunion, and Evie thought it was fantastic to sleep in a bed with daddy (Sara and Oliver shared the other bed). At least 3 times I woke up at night to her smooching me. We also took advantage of their swimming pool, to the point that Evie had purple lips, but still didn’t want to come out. They have a weird thing where the pool doesn’t have chemicals, but it has salt water instead. It’s supposed to be better for you, but all I know is that it tastes like crap!

Finally, we were off to Waupaca. We go to Waupaca every year and Evie just loves it. She said, “When I grow up, I’m gonna be a person in charge of Waupaca!” She loves the swimming pool, the playground, visiting with people, pretty much everything.

This time in particular, a few of the highlights were: drawing with the sidewalk chalk (which mostly meant forcing other people to draw what she wanted drawn), using her hands to walk all the way around the edge of the swimming pool (it was either that or cling to the ladder), her birthday party (of course), and playing with her 2nd cousins.

The birthday party was a big hit. We usually have a big potluck type dinner at Waupaca, but usually it is towards the end of the week. So we situated it on Monday to coincide with her birthday. Evie was happy to have so many people there and such good food to eat. She made everyone laugh by proclaiming all of the money she got in her cards was, “for college”. I’d say one of the best presents she got, or at least the one that she played with the most for the rest of the trip, was a Barbie from Uncle Marty (it’s funny because I know he won it in the raffle, but she really liked it!).

Evie: “Barbie has hearing aides!”
Me: “Do you mean earrings?”
Evie: “No, hearing aides! Like Grandma!”

Evie had a lot of fun playing with Braelynn and Jaysen. I was surprised she enjoyed Jaysen’s company so much, since Jaysen is so much older. The two things she’s mentioned the most is playing Pretty Pretty Princess with Jaysen, and a game invented by Jaames known as “hamster in, hamster out”. As far as I can tell, the game is played by saying “Hamster in!” or “Hamster out!” until Jaames says, “Hamster go bye-bye!” Evie thinks this is about the funniest thing she has ever heard in her life.

This time we stayed in a cabin instead of our tent, which was pretty nice. This was especially true because the cabin came equipped with air conditioning. The first night we didn’t use it because it felt like cheating, but the second night we broke down. It was about 7 million degrees in the little back room where Evie and I were sleeping on the bunk beds. The door had to stay open to get some air back there, which meant that my bunk was something like a cave, with only a tiny opening. The cabin also came equipped with a wasp trap, which was handy, due to all the wasps. The door had two screens on it, one with large holes, one with small holes. So the wasps would climb in the large holes and get stuck between the layers. We probably had 8 or so die this way by the end of the 3 days.

We took one side trip, to the Dairy State Cheese Company. Evie enjoyed watching them make cheese, but the real draw here was buying lots and lots of cheese on the cheap. We bought ~$30 of cheese (which probably translates to ~$60 of cheese anywhere else) including the best (and squeekiest!) cheese curds I have ever eaten. We bought some regular cheese as well as some delicacies, such as Buffalo Wing cheese and some 11 year cheddar. Everything was quite tasty (we haven’t eaten it all yet).

On most of our vacations, when we are spending an extraordinary amount of time in the car, Evie usually latches onto a particular CD and wants to hear it over and over again. This time I didn’t mind so much, because the CD she wanted to hear a million times was the Wicked soundtrack. I suspected she would like it, and it turns out I was right. When I was little, we used to listen to Jesus Christ Superstar endlessly. It occurred to me the other day that perhaps Wicked would be Evie’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Anyway, she’s getting some of the words down, but it’s proving a little more difficult than The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast.

Me: “What’s the most swankified place in town?!”
Evie: “Target!”
Me: “Ha ha! I was going for the Ozdust Ballroom.”

Finally, after 3 nights in Waupaca, we moved on to a hotel (and another pool) in Iron Mountain. We had a lot of laundry to do, but the real highlight of this part of the trip was the Badwater Ski-Ters. Apparently, every little town having its own water ski team is something unique to Wisconsin. Growing up we always went to see the local team whenever we got a chance. It was just what you did on like a Wednesday night if you weren’t doing anything else. Anyway, Sara had never seen a water ski show, so she was really excited to see one. It absolutely lived up to the hype. Not only were the Ski-Ters pretty dang good (I liked the jumps, but Sara liked the pyramids), but it was such a little slice of Americana. There were probably 150 people there on a Wednesday night. We had our little picnic. There was a boy scout troop. There was a lady who was having her 100th birthday. We took a million pictures.

There was one unpleasant part about the show though. Oliver basically hadn’t pooped since we started the vacation. So we knew it was coming, and come it did…right in the middle of the ski show. So Oliver gave everyone a show of his own while we tried to clean everything up. We more or less survived the incident without casualties. Side note, he just didn’t like pooping in disposable diapers! He pooped the *second* we got home and put him in cloth diapers!

So that was it for the first part of the trip. Next up, the U.P.!

Rounding the Lake Part 1: Break Dance

/ Shane / 5 Comments

So, for those of you who didn’t know, we were on vacation for about a week and a half, rounding lake Michigan. We camped our way from Chicago up through Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the Mackinac Bridge, and then down through Michigan and back to Chicago.

Normally I would recount the trip in chronological order, however, the end of the trip sort of overshadowed what came before. So I’m going to start there, and then start back at the beginning for the rest of the trip.

So here is the story, as best I was able to piece together. We were camping in more or less the middle of the Upper Peninsula, and had been staying at the same place for a couple of nights. This was Saturday night. We were planning to leave the campground on Sunday and travel part way home, finishing up the trip on Monday.

We had been having the camp fires by our cabin, since they mostly took place after Oliver and Evie were in bed. Around 11 or so, everybody decided to pack it in, but Sara and I stayed up for a little bit with the fire. We had been sitting and talking for a little bit when we suddenly heard screaming coming from the other end of the campground.

There were many other people with campfires up on our end of the campground, and they all went silent, listening. We thought someone had played a prank on someone else. “There were some young kids down there,” said Sara. My first thought was that maybe someone had put something in someone else’s bed, or perhaps jumped out in the dark and scared them. But the screaming went on and on for quite a while, prompting one of the guys next to us to say, “Okay, it’s not funny anymore. It’s not funny.” So I knew they also were thinking it was some sort of prank. (More on these guys later, in the other post)

After a while, the screaming stopped, and everyone eventually went back to their conversations. Shortly after that, I realized I had to go to the bathroom, so I took my stuff to get ready for bed and left Sara to stay at the cabin.

When I was in the bathroom I ran into my father-in-law Tom, and we joked around a little bit before he left. When I left the bathroom a few minutes later, I noticed that someone had pulled their truck around and turned the headlights on, shining them on a tight group of people. I saw Tom over by the group, so I decided to go down there and check it out, thinking I could ask him what was going on.

My first thought was that maybe someone had hit a dog (there were a lot of dogs at the campground). I thought maybe the screaming had been from someone who had seen or found their dog after being hit. As I got closer to the group, I noticed that almost all of the people in the group were from our family. “Huh, that’s weird,” I thought, but not so crazy. After all, their cabin was close by, so if they heard screaming they would obviously come out to see what was going on. It still had not occurred to me at this point that these events could in any way be connected to our family.

When I finally got to where the people were, there was this surreal moment where they parted before me like the Red Sea, and I saw that my sister-in-law Anna was the object of all the attention. She was lying on the ground with her head in my brother-in-law Ben’s lap. My eyes traveled quickly down and I got a good eyeful of her ankle. The foot was clearly twisted at an unnatural ankle. It didn’t take a doctor to see that it was pretty seriously broken.

Anna and Ben had been walking back from the fire at our cabin and had just about made it back to their cabin. There was just a small hole or uneven place in the ground, and that was enough for Anna to trip and break both of her legs.

I should mention that Anna and Tom both have a genetic condition known as Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI). This condition causes their bones to be brittle (think Mr. Glass from Unbreakable). Therefore, a small trip or bump that normally wouldn’t mean much of anything to a normal person, could be a serious injury to someone with OI.

When Anna first fell, Ben dropped what he was carrying and ran to her. “I just broke both of my legs!” she gasped, and Ben turned and ran for the cabin. The second his back was turned, Anna began screaming, which was what we heard up at our end, by the fire. Ben ran the length of the cabin pounding on the wall, rounded the corner, threw open the door and yelled, “Anna just broke both of her legs.” Before anyone could even stumble out of bed, he was off again, running back to Anna. Anna continued screaming until Ben got back to her, where he stayed until she was loaded into the ambulance.

So, by the time I got down there, I was one of the last people to the party. The ambulance had already been called and things were more or less under control. “Go tell Lisa,” someone said and I went right away, happy to have something to do. On the way over to their motor home, I called Sara.

“Remember all that screaming we heard?” I said, “That was your sister.” Okay, in retrospect I probably could have broken that to her a little more gently. In any event, by the time I told the other members of the family, I decided I better head back up to the cabin, because I figured Sara would have gone down to the other end immediately.

Sure enough, when I got up there, Sara was gone and she had given the baby monitor to the random people camping next to us. “That screaming was my sister,” she said, “Our kids are in the cabin. Can you watch them?” “Are they sleeping??” they asked. So they were fairly relieved when I got back up there, not only to take back the responsibility of the kids, but also to give them some information about what was going on.

Around this time the first responders had arrived, followed shortly by an ambulance. This clued everyone at the campsite into the fact that something was going on, and that screaming they heard was more than just kids messing around. I kept thinking to myself, “Why didn’t I go down there right away? The screaming was so obviously painful. Even if it hadn’t been someone in the family, I should have at least gone down to check it out.”

Lisa showed up to the cabin to sit with the kids, and I went back down to see what was going on. Anna wanted Sara to ride with her in the ambulance, and she didn’t want either of her parents to drive (their car, not the ambulance)(she probably didn’t want them to drive the ambulance either), in case they were too upset. In retrospect, I don’t think they were, but it was kind of hectic at the time and it was sort of hard to get everything sorted out. So the plan was that I would go bundle up Oliver and drive him and Tom and Barb to the hospital. Orlan would follow after to take me back to the campsite.

Of course I was stumbling around in the dark in the cabin trying to put together a bag for Oliver and Sara (diapers, change of clothes, toothbrush, etc.) and Evie woke up. She wanted a drink and wanted to know what was going on. “Nothing,” I blithely lied, “Just getting some stuff that mommy wanted.” I knew she couldn’t see me take Oliver out, or she would know there was something up. So I managed to sneak him out without her noticing, which I think was a major feat. Oliver obliged me by being a good little kidnap victim, rather than crying out.

We got to the hospital quite a while after that. Not only was the hospital pretty far away (we were in the middle of nowhere after all), but the last thing I wanted to do was hit a deer or moose on the way to the hospital. So we were going fairly slow.

We were trying to guess about what was going on based on what we could see going in and out of the emergency room. The doctor came out and told us he had put her on morphine. Shortly thereafter we saw them wheeling in a portable x-ray machine. It seemed like maybe they were getting ready to set it, but it seemed too soon for something like that. Later we found out that the break was bad enough, and unstable enough, that they wanted to set it as soon as possible.

This part was a little hard to take out in the waiting room. There was a lot of screaming. I was surprised at how much screaming there was, given that they had told us they were putting her on morphine and versed. It was just that painful. In fact, Sara later told us that they had given her a considerable amount. The doctor kept saying, “Give me one more of morphine. Another two of versed. Another one of morphine.” etc. The versed is specifically to get rid of the memory of setting it, so she actually doesn’t remember this part, which is probably for the better, at least considering what it sounded like out in the waiting room.

I didn’t see the x-rays, but Sara said that the foot was dislocated quite a ways from the leg bone. They had to set it and then when they x-rayed it to see if it was right, the realized it needed to move still further. So it must have been pretty far off.

Finally, they let Tom and Barb go back to see her. “Write down all the silly stuff she says on morphine, for my blog!” I said. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to report, other than when she very first got the morphine and she said, “Ollie ollie oxen free, and all that stuff.”

We finally left the hospital and got back to the campsite at about 3:15. The plan was to get some sleep and then pack up in the morning. Tom and Barb would probably check into a hotel by the hospital, and we would continue on our trip as originally planned. However, this was not the way it went down.

First off, Evie was up before 6, which was a little rough. Second off, I got a call at about 6:45 which changed everything. The hospital there in the U.P. wasn’t equipped to handle the surgery Anna needed, so she had been discharged at about 3:30. Rather than have her transferred to a different hospital nearby, they propped her up in the car and started out immediately for the hospital at home.

We were a little worried about this, because we now had one less car than we came with. However, everything worked out well, and we left by about 10 or so. Tom rode with Evie and I (because I have tendency to fall asleep, even when I have more than 2 1/2 hours of sleep) and we followed Ben. Evie fell asleep and totally missed the Mackinac Bridge, but other than that it was a wildly successful trip. Evie colored in her coloring book for like 2 hours.

Anna had surgery to put some plates and screws in the one ankle. Evie might not have been completely clear on this part, because after Anna got back from surgery Evie asked, “Can I see your plates and forks?” The break in the other ankle was much more minor, and in fact, she has a walking cast and can put weight on it.

There was some trouble finding the right medication (the initial mix of vicodin and oxycodone wasn’t cutting the mustard), but the current mix seems to be working good. She can get up with a walker / wheelchair combo, although it is enough of a pain (literally and figuratively) that it’s not worth moving very much.

The one upside to all this (if it can be called that) was that, while at the hospital, we bumped into an old friend of mine who was doing a rotation at the hospital. We managed to catch dinner one night and discussed the magnificent yogurt parfaits they had in the hospital cafeteria. Reid has been doing these rotations away from his wife and kids and living in the hospital, so I think he appreciated seeing us as much as I appreciated seeing him. At least he thanked Anna for falling and breaking her leg and creating an opportunity for us to get together. 🙂

Anyway, that’s the story. Luckily (?) it happened at the end of vacation, so it actually didn’t change much about the rest of the vacation, other than extending it by a few days (although they were a little stressful for “vacation” days, if you know what I mean).

Here’s hoping Anna’s recovery is swift and the lingering effects are minimal!