Waupaca

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.

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.!

Missing: One Blogger

/ Shane / 2 Comments

So, you’ve probably noticed there haven’t been a lot of posts lately.  That is because we have been having some crazy weeks lately!  First off, I went to Detroit for business from Tuesday until Thursday night, then Friday we left for WI for a family reunion until Sunday, followed by camping with family from Sunday until Wednesday, followed by one night in Madison with my brother, then back to Chicago on Thursday when people began arriving for Evie’s big birthday party which was on Saturday.  I think we are mostly cleaned up now and everything put back in order, but there are still a few loose ends.  Lets just say I am not looking forward to going to work tomorrow, but I am looking forward to a weekend off next weekend!

So lets see, camping.  Well, let me say for starters that this was the most exhausting vacation I have ever had.  Camping tends to be a lot of work in the first place, but with a baby it is 10 times worse.  There are so many more things to take with you and remember and every time you leave the campsite you end up making 3 more trips back because of all the things you forgot.  So we were planning on driving all the way to the reunion but by the time we got out the door and then with typical Friday rush hour traffic, we realized we were crazy to think we could go that far in one day.  So we ended up finding a campsite at a state park along the way.  Even though it meant putting up and taking down the tent one extra time and rearranging the car a little, it ended up working out pretty well.  It was only $30 total for the night (rather than $100 or who knows how much for a hotel) and it really wasn’t all that much work.  The only bad thing was the mosquitoes!  Due to all the flooding, the mosquito population in WI is really out of control.  I probably got ~25 bites that first night.  They were actually fine for the rest of the trip, but that first night we couldn’t even leave the tent.

The reunion was a lot of fun, although it seemed like a lot of people were missing; specifically my cousins!  Very few of them were there.  Attendance was a little down this year, I think it was around like 170 people.  This was my first time at the new site, but I liked it.  The only complaint I have about the whole thing was the fireworks.  Now, I understand that not everybody has a sleeping baby and its not like I am one of those parents who thinks the whole world should stop and bow to my will because I have a kid, but I have to tell you it was as if the fireworks were going off on top of our tent.  In fact that is not wholely inaccurate since I was standing outside of my tent when the first one went off and an 18 inch piece of debris landed about 2 feet away from me.  Aunt Lois actually found some of the debris inside her car the next day!  But I digress.  By the time Sara made it to the tent she found me huddling over Evie with a pillow covering our heads.  But it worked apparently because she was back asleep as soon as the fireworks were over.  She even slept through the 4 wheeler drive-by / off road show a few hours later.  Oh, and (as usual) our dish to pass went over very poorly.  That wasn’t so bad though, since we ate it for pretty much the rest of the trip.

The rest of the camping went pretty good as well.  There is not a lot of time to relax since (like at home) you are always thinking about the next thing the baby needs to do.  By the time you get everybody up and showered and dressed, you start thinking about breakfast, then diaper changes, then naps then lunch, then more diaper changes, etc.  Before you know it you are working on baths and pajamas and bedtime.  It was fairly hot, but we (I) managed a dip in the pool I think every day.  The campsite was really nice, I would definitely recommend it.  It was obvious that the people really work hard to make it a nice place.  The pictures on the website don’t really do it justice, but maybe that is because they are constantly upgrading everything.  My family has gone there I think 7 of the last 8 years or something like that.  Some of them even get Christmas cards from the owners!  I would definitely go back there again.  We would probably still tent camp, but the cabins were probably the nicest cabins I have ever seen at a camp site.  Our tent was the perfect distance from the site where we had a fire every night: far enough away that we wouldn’t wake her up, but close enough that we could get there in a hurry if we needed to

Speaking of being away from the tent, Sara had this great idea I think she got maybe from parent hacks.  In order to separate ourselves a little bit from the tent when Evie was sleeping, we improvised a baby monitor.  Sara would call my phone, put both phones on speaker and then mute my phone.  Her phone would stay with the baby.  Since we don’t use minutes between our phone, we could let it go like that for hours.  The only hard part is remembering to charge our phones constantly.

Anyway, Evie was again walking like a maniac all the time and again improved so much on the skill that she is now walking.  Everyone was really helpful with her and it was very appreciated.  She is starting to have some serious mommy issues (like separation anxiety).  Also, she got some major diaper rash which meant kicking and screaming at every diaper change as well as hating the outdoor baths.  Even though there were plenty of people to take her for long periods of time, I just got more and more worn out every day that went by.  By the time we left I was sooo glad we were staying in a hotel the next night and not camping or even going back to our own house.  If we went back to our place we would have ended up unpacking, etc.  So the hotel was perfect.

So we went to Madison and got to take a tour of the capitol where little brother works.  His co-worker gave us a tour, and he could definitely be a tour guide.  He has worked there for something like 38 years so he definitely knew what he was talking about.  Our hotel was literally across the street from the capitol which was handy since we had to leave early from the orchestral “concert on the square” to get Evie to bed, but we could still hear and see it from our room.  We walked around the shops and things and ate at some restaurants and generally confirmed what everybody says:  Madison is a great town!  We even discussed what it would be like to live there, although probably not until we retired.  The only thing we’re not sure of is that it, like much of the rest of Wisconsin, seems to be built on quite a beer culture that we have no desire to participate in.  Well, it was just an intellectual exercise, but it goes to show you it is a nice town!

Okay, I think that is enough for one night!