Loincloth Weekend and Other Ordinary Happenings

Because I don't want anyone to think I spend my days lost in a existential crisis or in a haze of intense introspection, I'm devoting this post to what I do the vast majority of time.

Which would be the opposite of the activities just mentioned.

The past few weeks have been, to put it simply, ca-RAZY.  But in the good kind of way. 

Allow me to give you a photo recap:

For starters, Favorite came to visit!  You'll remember her from this post.

And I made her hike.  In the heat.  But she just got back from the jungles of Colombia, so I was pretty sure she could handle it.

When not hiking, wine-tasting, and otherwise showing off local attractions, we sampled the local fare:

Pete's Hamburger Stand

I barely had enough time to recover from Favorite's visit before Rendezvous weekend, which coincided with Ladies Weekend.  How do I explain what The Rendezvous is?  Allow me to go into historian/interpreter mode:

This little corner of the Driftless has long been known as a meeting place of different peoples.  The first written accounts of this place make mention of what would later be called St. Feriole Island as a great center of trade between tribes, and as the years went on it became a trading center between American Indians and French-Canadian fur-trappers, and then between American Indians, French-Canadian fur-traders, and Euro-American settlers.  To celebrate this heritage, groups of fur trade-era enthusiasts gather together every year, set up their tipis, tents, campfires, wares, and trinkets and just have a fine time.  There's also a big flea market, and lots of food venders offering Indian fry bread, homemade ice cream, and buffalo burgers.  So at any given time, you can have a typical family perusing the beads and drums for sale by a woman in a bonnet as a man in a loin cloth walks by.  Hence the name of this post.  Sadly, no pictures of loin clothes made the final cut to posting.

In general, it's a very colorful place.

I bring you beads.

I forgot to mention the fried catfish.

Show me your wares!

Dye your own rabbit's feet!!

Immediately following Loincloth Weekend (leaving no time to catch up on sleep from the outings involved with Ladies Weekend), was an event that encapsulated everything I love about the Driftless.

The Bottomlands for Birds river cruise.

I actually had no idea this particular river cruise had a name until about halfway through.  I was just told to show up and knew there would be a lot of bird talk.  They had me at "river."

Essentially, the cruise forced a lot of professional birders, bird enthusiasts, authors, photographers, landowners, and natural resouce managers into one place for an extended period of time.  Audubon, Fish and Wildlife, NPS, the grass-fed beef industry, we had all the agencies covered!

There's nothing quite like it.

We stopped at a small beach to listen for ceruleans (no dice) and then stopped again for a fish fry - which I had not expected, and that made it all the more delightful.  While we waited for the fish to cook, we learned a bit more about Bottomlands for Birds.  It's a nifty program designed to help private landowners manage their holdings in a way that benefits some of the most vulnerable bird species in Minnesota and Iowa: the prothonotary warbler, the red-shouldered hawk, and the cerulean warbler.

Those of us on the boat know how important the Upper Mississippi is to birds, not just in terms of habitat, but also in terms of migration.  Songbirds, waterfowl, and raptors all use the river to find their way to either their breeding grounds or wintering grounds.  When this point was emphasized, as if by magic, a flock of American White Pelicans flew overhead:

This would've been a better picture, but I was lost in a haze of avian conservation-induced euphoria.

They were so close!  Show-offs.




After the excitement of the pelicans, we got down to the business of gorging on freshly fried fish, potatoes, and watermelon.

Don't be fooled, this was my second plate.

But alas, all things must come to end.  As the sun set, we headed homeward.

In the time since then, my time has been occupied by the smaller things life:


Like the blossoms on my eggplants!



And the blossoms on my dark opal basil plant...right before I snipped them off.

So the garden has been coming along fine.  Until a tree fell on it.  Twice.  Ah, nature.



Then of course, came the first Independence Day I've had off of work for as long as I can remember.  Like my birthday, I seem to spend the 4th of July somewhere different every year.  Was it really a year ago I was in Hamburg, IA about to have the time of my life? 

To celebrate, I went with my cousins to the parade in Eastman, WI - with an obscene amount of Flav-or-Ices, candy, tractors, and standing on the asphalt for two hours during an Excessive Heat Warning.  Nothing really gets more American than that.

Except of course, this.

Happy (belated) 4th of July!!