Wisconsin-Missouri in March/April - Day Three

Promotion is never ending
as Meg poses with Party
Shop Gorilla!

Today is Bout Day.  For those of you not familiar with roller derby lingo that is what you and I might call a roller derby match.  If you are interested in learning more about roller derby, I suggest an excellent entry in that fount of all knowledge, worthwhile and otherwise, Wikipedia.  Click here to go to the entry for roller derby.  The roller derby that I remember watching on television as a kid was contested on banked tracks and was actually more sports entertainment with scripted outcomes; think wrestling.  Modern roller derby is a competitive contact sport with the outcome dependent on the dynamics of the bout.  The following from the Wikipedia article is a nice summary of the current culture:

Modern roller derby is an international sport dominated by all-female amateur teams, in addition to a growing number of male, co-ed, and junior roller derby teams, and was (as a roller sport) under consideration for the 2020 Olympics.^[5][6][7] Most modern leagues (their back-office volunteers included) share a strong "do it yourself" ethic^[8] which combines athleticism and elements from camp,^[9] and feminist aesthetics consistent with third-wave feminism.^{[citation needed]} As of 2012 the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, or WFTDA, had 172 leagues.

Meg breaking out of the jam to become lead jammer.

 The Paper Valley Roller Girls played a team from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.  It was a double header.  PVRG Flying Squirrels were soundly defeated by the Hammer City Harlots.  This the level Meg played at last year but she has moved up to the A team, the PVRG All Stars.  As in all sports, the next level up has players who are bigger, stronger, faster, and more experienced.  While Meg isn't any bigger, she is stronger, faster, and more experienced with two years of play.  she didn't expect to play very much and she didn't.  She was in two early jams as jammer and scored some points but the game was highly competitive throughout both periods.  The All Stars won by 12 points which in roller derby is practically a tie.  It was in issue right down to the final jam with no time left.  It was a wonderful way to start the season.

At the half time of the B game, Meg had to begin paying off on a Super Bowl bet.  She of course had the ill-fated, over classed Broncos who totally collapsed against the Seahawks, the favorite team of one of her team mates.  As a result, Meg has to sing a song at each home bout, selected and modified by the winner.  Tonight it was "We are champions of the world."  I captured the performance on video and was going to post it here but frankly it was so bad that I didn't want to subject friends and family to seeing and hearing it unless that actively chose to do so.  So, if you want to experience it, click here to go to the YouTube video of the performance(?)

I passed on the after bout party" at the Blind Pig, the official bar of the PVRG.  Apparently each party has a theme and players are to come in costume.  The night's theme was "construction workers."  I had a flash of inspiration that I had to credit to my son, Brendan, who is production manager for Dan Ryan Home Builders in Morgantown WV.  I have listened to many stories from Brendan about the Amish framing crews that he used in home construction.  I thought that this would be something that very few in Wisconsin would come up with.  Hence after some creative shopping, Meg became a member of an Amish framing crew.  No one at the house is up yet so I don't know how that all turned out.

This morning I leave for Kansas City.

You can view photos on the Picasa site by clicking here.

Wisconsin-Missouri in March/April - Day Two

The Fox River has probably looked like this for over 100 years
but this picture was taken March 28, 2014.

Meg and Bubbles on air with Guy Dark

The weather has begun to moderate and it was quite pleasant outdoors yesterday:  some sun, no snow, little wind and temps in the 30's.  After lunch and some Roller Derby errands, we drove to Oshkosh for some radio interviews promoting the opening of the Paper Valley roller girls season Saturday.  Meg--Deviled Meg--was joined by Bubbles De Smeare, a teammate--for promotional interviews with Steve Edwards (WVBO 103.9 The Valley's Best Oldies) and Guy Dark Larivee (96.9 The Fox Appleton's New Rock.)

We stopped by the Lawrence campus which is empty for all practical purposes.  This is a week between terms and the students were all gone.  Classes begin this Monday.  This important for Meg because it marks the conclusion of her term as director of freshman studies program, a responsibility she has held for three years and which became increasing onerous.  She is looking forward to just teaching physics and astronomy including the design and construction of an on-campus observatory.  Actually the photo at the top of this blog is taken from the

approximate possible location of the observatory.  We stopped in the statistic computer classroom where I took some interesting photos.  This one is my favorite.  If you cannot see why, take look at the one below.

We enjoyed a leisurely dinner at The Koreana Restaurant.  Meg had wanted to have a fish fry at a local and popular place but it had a 90 minute wait in a crowded and noisy bar.  One of her housemates--Justine--joined us for dinner.  It was nice getting to know her.

Eventually the house began to fill up as the night went on but I went to bed and slept well.

Check the Picasa album for more pictures.

Wisconsin-Missouri in March/April - Day One

Landing in Chicago

I am on the road again, this time to Wisconsin to visit my daughter Meg and then on to Kansas City to visit family there.  Instead of leaving at my usual early morning time, I took a very comfortable noon flight to Chicago and then was booked on a later afternoon flight to Appleton where I would arrive in time for dinner.  Well, I didn't get to Appleton until after 10:00 PM and that was the second time I had flown to Appleton from O'Hare that day.  An explanation is perhaps in order?

While the winter weather of snow and ice has pretty much come to an end, they have moved directly into heavy spring weather.  My first flight to Appleton, left right on time at 3:00 and arrived in---well, let's say at Appleton--on time at 4:00.  We got to 100 feet from the ground when the pilot decided to abort the landing.  Seems he couldn't quite see the runway clearly enough to attempt a landing.  After that little burst of adrenalin as the plane tilted nose up, the engines powered up and the gear retracted, we got above the clouds and he explained what had happened.  He also explained that we didn't have enough fuel to attempt another landing and make it to our secondary field (back to Chicago) if that landing had to be aborted.  So we just headed back to Chicago where I waited four hours for the next flight which thankfully proved to be uneventful.

Taking off from Chicago the second time.

Meg picked me up and we went back to her new house which is quite nice and large.  I met one of her housemates and will meet the other two on Friday.  All four of them are on the roller derby team and will be having their opening "bout" this Saturday evening.

New Orleans Mardi Gras - Day Six

Grave of Marie Laveau

We have been back from New Orleans for a week now but I had several responsibilities that prevented me from posting our final day.  The weather was steadily improving and we enjoyed a lot of walking on our final day.  Our first stop was a t our of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.  Our guide was very informative and opinionated especially about the ways in which people vandalized the graves under the guise of superstition.  This was especially evident at the grave of Marie Laveau, the reputed voodoo queen of New Orleans.  Visitors would mark the grave with three X's in hopes that she would grant their wishes.  You can read all about her by clicking here.  We also learned that guides are licensed by the City of New Orleans and carry their licenses with them.  With all the tourists coming to New Orleans, the city wants to prevent ripoffs by nefarious operators.

After a morning among the dead, we drove our car out to the Garden District and did our own walking tour using the AAA tour book.  As the name suggests, this is an area of beautiful homes and gardens, an area untouched by the devastation of Katrina.  Generally it seems that the wealthy have their homes on the high (at least higher) ground.  The Live Oaks and the Resurrection Ferns gave a feeling of perpetual spring time even with the chilly than normal weather.

After we stopped for coffee in a local coffee shop, we searched out Mandina's where we had lunch of traditional New Orleans cooking.  We decided to spend the rest of the afternoon strolling through the French Quarter.  Things were quieter, of course, than earlier in the week but there were plenty of people and activity as everyone was getting ready for the weekend.  Well, maybe it is like that on any day in the French Quarter.

A quiet day on Bourbon Sreet

We also enjoyed an impromptu parade down Bourbon Street which you can enjoy by playing the video below

.

You can view more photos in the final day's photo album by clicking here.

New Orleans Mardi Gras - Day Five

Marilyn in front of some of the 28 Virginia Live Oaks
that give Oak Alley Plantation its name.

We knew that the weather today would not be optimal but we didn't think it would be as cold, rainy and windy as it turned out.  However, we had planned on mostly indoor activity visiting some plantations about an hour outside of New Orleans.

Our first stop was at the aptly named Oak Alley Plantation.  In addition to a tour of the house, we went through a rather elaborate and realistic history of slavery on this particular sugar plantation.  The stories were very specific including one about a slave man who was given his freedom but continued to work on the plantation and saved up enough money to buy his wife when he was 70 and she was 60.  He continued to live and work on the plantation for two reasons.  There was very little opportunity for him to do anything else and their two sons continued in slavery until the end of the Civil War.  He was listed in a federal census as living on the plantation at age 100.

The Oak Alley name came from the 28 Virginia Live Oaks that predated the house (built in 1835) by over 100 years.  No one knows who planted the trees.  If there had been a previous house, there is no record of it.  In 1775 there was a reference to the trees but not a house.  By the way, house was built by a husband to lure his young wife away from New Orleans to life on a plantation.

Laura Plantation house

Our next stop was Laura Plantation which is billed as Creole plantation.  We had a very interesting and detailed tour of the house and the other buildings many of which are in the disrepair into which they had fallen.  This house was built in 1803 and was more rustic than Oak Alley.  This family had its major base of social operations in opulent town houses in New Orleans and really only conducted business on the plantation.  They showed their wealth in New Orleans but they gained their wealth through the slave economy of the plantation.

Slave quarters

In contrast to the big house, you can see one of the surviving slave cabins in which four people lived in a 15 x 15 space.  Once slavery ended, most of the those freed continued to live and work on the plantation.  They were paid a modest wage but were basically forced to spend it on buying goods and supplies from a company store.  Incredibly there were people living in these structures as late as 1977 when the plantation was sold and it was no longer possible for people to live in these buildings.

You can see more photos in the album by clicking here.

New Orleans Mardi Gras - Days Three and Four

I combined days three and four because we didn't do much on the third day even though it was Mardi Gras itself.  The temperatures were in the thirties with steady rain and wind chills in the twenties.  In fact, parts of New Orleans got sleet and freezing rain.  Needless to say, the weather cut down on the crowds, changed parade times, and generally increased the speed at which the parades moved.  All of this was irrelevant to us because we spent the day at a multiplex watching movies:  Leningrad and Non Stop.

Wednesday, make that Ash Wednesday, we decided to drive about an to Houma (homa) LA is the gateway to bayou country, a national heritage area named Atchafalaya.  Our first stop was the Houma Tourist Bureau where Marilyn chatted up Joey.  We got a lot of information about the area including the difference between Cajun and Creole.  Creole culture is older and came from French speaking people from France during the French colonial days.  Being older, the Creoles were the first land owners and developed the early plantations.  Their cuisine is more "cultured" and features rich sauces.  Cajun culture developed from French speaking people who came from Canada escaping the domination of the British.  They settled in the Bayou country and hunted, trapped and fished.  Their cuisine features spices used to cover up the gamey taste.   Joey, it turns out, can speak both Cajun and Creole.

We drove down to what Joey described as the "historic district" and found very little of historic interest.  The Folk Art and Culture center was closed with a sign that said they would be back at 2:00.  This was at 11:00 in the morning.  Since we had booked reservations for a swamp tour with Annie Miller's Son's Swamp and Marsh Tours, we needed to get lunch and get to the pick up point which turned out to be a local cafe on Bayou Black which allowed the tour to use its dock.  Thus we drove to the Bayou Delight Restaurant where the waitress was not about to let us order any meat dish because ti was Ash Wednesday.  We opted for white beans, rice and catfish.

We boarded our tour boat with nine other hardy souls and set off for a bone chilling tour.  It was too cool and cloudy to see any alligators who apparently have the good sense to stay indoors during inclement weather but we were treated to sites of egrets, herons, and eagles.  We saw some gorgeous homes.  Houma is in Terrebonne Parish where the unemployment rate is 3 percent due to the petrochemical industry.  We also got out on the Intercoastal Waterway and got close to some tugs and barges.  It was bumpy and windy as this video shows.



We saw some interesting birds including a Great Blue Heron and a Blue Heron which are in the same frame in the photo below.

Great Blue Heron on the left and Blue Heron on the right.

Just in case you have a hard time seeing the Blue Heron, here is a photo of it taking flight.

We returned to the restaurant where we saw some photos of Annie Miller - Alligator Annie - who was a true character of Atchafalaya and the founder of the swamp tours at age 67.  We drove back to New Orleans and finished our day with a delicious dinner at Acme Oyster House in Metairie about a quarter mile from our hotel.

One final image is a photo of Marilyn next to one of the pictures of Alligator Annie in the Bayou Delight Restaurant.

You can see more photos by clicking here.

You can view of video of our boat flushing an egret down Bayou Black by clicking here.

New Orleans Mardi Gras - Day Two

Marilyn with a casually dressed friend

Well, so much for the warm weather and sunny skies.  Monday was cool (cold by local standards) with fairly consistent winds up to 20 mph.  We still saw a lot of people walking around the French Quarter in shorts and flimsy tops.  Marilyn couldn't understand how they could not feel the cold.  I pointed out that I didn't think they were feeling much of anything!  "Oh, of course" she replied.  We spent the day in he French Quarter and Riverside Park where the Lundi Gras celebration was under way.

We found a parking structure for the day without much trouble and at a reasonable price.  All those warnings about parking etc. seem to be overblown.  After a visit to the Visitors' Bureau, we set off for a walking tour of the French Quarter.  This was late morning so things were fairly normal.  After meeting Marilyn's new friend (shown at left), we spent sometime in Jackson Square outside St. Louis Cathedral.  Not surprisingly, the church was secured so we will wait for another day to see the interior.  There was plenty going on outside to keep our attention.

Some of the people gathered outside St. Louis Cathedral.

We had a delicious lunch at The Gumbo Shop in the courtyard.  It was would been a lovely venue on a seasonal day but even though they had the heaters on, I could see my breath and used my coffee cup to warm my hands!

We decided to spend the afternoon at the Lundi Gras (Fat Monday) in Riverside Park.  This is put on by the Krewe of Zulu.  There was plenty of good music and colorful characters.  The group to left just randomly showed up and paraded around the park grounds in the midst of all the music performances and the food tents.  We stayed as long as we could and then sought some rest in a food court with nice restrooms.  It is one of the realities of traveling as a senior that one is always aware of the location, cleanliness and accessibility of restrooms.  Yesterday we saw the local Convent of the Sacred Heart was providing access to clean portapotties for a $10 all day pass.  There is always a market opportunity!

We found our way to Cafe du Mode and enjoyed cafe au lait and beignets.  We then decided to make our way back to the car and call it a day.  We passed by St. Louis again and I got some nice setting sun shots from the north side of the park.

 I decided that we should walk back to Canal Street down Bourbon Street.  It was as packed as it would be later that night but there was enough going to give us both a feel fro what it would be like later that night!

Once we got out to Canal, it looked like people setting up for one of the evening parades.  Since we were only a couple of blocks from our car, we decided to hang around and see another parade.  As the sun set, it got colder and when we learned that it would be at least another hour before it got to our location, we decided to bag it and head back to Metairie and our hotel.  We did meet a young man, Jasper, who was visiting the US from Norway.  His English was excellent.  He was "couch surfing" during his stay.  Unfrotunately, I forgot to take his picture.

Double cheeseburger pasta!

The evening ended with a adventurous dinner at Semolina where I had a double cheese burger pasta.  Interesting, inventive and delicious.

You can view the photos from this day at a separate album by clicking here.

New Orleans Trip - Day One

We are up early but excited to leave the COLD!

For the first time since our honeymoon in 2000, we decided to have a vacation that did not involve visiting family members.  Of course, we love those trips but we decided it was time that we took advantage of the fact that we are both retired and have the resources to travel and experience places we haven't been.  Mardi Gras was our first choice, aided a bit by the brutal winter we have been enjoying Rochester.  As I write this, the temperature in Rochester is 7 with a wind chill of 10 below.  Yesterday it was 78 in New Orleans.  guess we lucked out.  Click here for updated Picasa album.

Rochester airport as we took off

As we usually do, we connected through Chicago-O'Hare.  I was expecting some delays due to the storm that was moving through the Midwest but we got to ORD on time and left only about 45 minutes behind schedule.  We stopped by the La Quinta where we are staying and got some local intelligence about where to go for "family friendly" parades.  Not that we are old fogeys but we are styaing away from Bourbon Street in the evenings until after Mardi Gras.  Since we are here till Saturday morning we will have plenty of time to hear some music and eat good food without what the Visitors Bureau describe as the "bawdy scene."

We drove down to the Uptown venue and parked on a side street and walked to the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles.  We saw two parades:  the Krewe of Thoth and the Krewe of Bacchus.  We collected our share of beads and got into the spirit of Mardi Gras.

This my favorite.  Step ladder with bench
for two or more kids and a chute to
deposit beads etc. into a container.

There were a lot of families as well as young people, high school and college kids.  While there was some racial diversity, the crowd was over overwhelmingly white.  We immediately realized that we should have brought a step ladder from home since that is the key to getting the best view of the parade and garnering the maximum amount of goodies being tossed from the floats.

The first parade was the Krewe of Thoth and began at noon and ended around three.  The Krewe of Bacchus was a night parade beginning at 5:30 with "super floats" complete with lights and awesome decorations.  Between each float was a marching band.  As the bands approached, the marshals would move the crown back to make room.  Once the band passed by, the crowd would surge out into the street to get close to the floats.  We felt like we were part of a sea of humanity.  Hugh Laurie of House was the reigning Bacchus this year.  Here is a taste of the experience.


You can view photos of the trip at the daily updated photo album by clicking here.