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.!