Spectacular September 2015

Porcelain Basin

Buffalo with an attitude

Happy relaxed Henkels

September was a month to remember for Mark and Hilde.  After almost thirty years, they finally managed to go west for a vacation, leaving behind lawsuits, lawns, garden produce and county issues.   They really relaxed!   It was a great trip covering 2,790 miles over 7 ½ days.  The size and beauty of western US can’t be expressed, it has to be experienced.  Both Henkels enjoyed the enormous fields of corn, beans, wheat stubble and then sunflowers, sorghum and rapeseed, interspersed with vast pastures of black cattle. 

Mark and Hilde visited several historic military sites, including Ft. Phil Kearny, the battlefield sites for the Wagon Box Fight, Custer’s Last Stand and the Fetterman Massacre and then headed into Yellowstone for a couple of days.  What a treasure we have out there!  The lake so enormous, clear and tranquil, edged by seething mud, steam and geysers defies description.  The crowds were not too bad, but travel was slowed since right after Labor Day road work on the park starts, since they have a narrow window of work time before snow and cold.

View from Gardiner

Between Old Trail Town, complete with reburied western victims and a large collection of authentic buildings, and the wonderful Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Mark and Hilde found Cheyenne to be worth an entire day.  The Buffalo Bill Center has nature science museum, an enormous museum of firearms and another section of western Indians with some stunning artwork.  The section on Buffalo Bill was prefaced with a projection on mist for a holograph and traced his long colorful life.  A beautiful place!

Of course trips of this extent have a few glitches, like having the camera die, an infection, and minor problem with the car, but since Hilde’s county iPad takes good photos, Sheridan has a very efficient and patient friendly urgent care and a guy in Buffalo helped with the car for free, those incidents did not mar a lovely time.  It was great trip.

Right up to the day of departure and immediately upon return, Hilde was working on tomatoes.   After many quarts of juice before leaving, she switched to  making and freezing tomato soup for the winter weekends…LOTS of soup, plus a batch of the Schultz home-made ketchup.  This month brought on the fall raspberries and Mark and Hilde spent many afternoons out in the sunshine, picking more of those lovely fruits, storing them up for topping all the oatmeal .  

Happy girls

 Mark worked hard to clear out the tomatoes and finish fall tasks, including small areas of painting on the garage, a second coat on the new hen house door and then fixing the lawnmower when a drive belt snapped.  Hilde repainted the picnic tables and benches and FINALLY, after 2 0 years, stained and sealed the final bits of the molding and door frame for the bedroom, with Mark promptly installing and rehanging the bedroom door.  The temporary doorframe is finally gone!

Since all the canning, freezing and ketchup-making still left a lot of tomatoes, Hilde filled the back of the car and met Kayme in Winchester to pass them along to her.  The reward was a lovely picnic and playtime with Kayme and the grandkids on another perfect fall day.

Grandma and Caleb

Mark continued to work “half-time” which means he is not in the office full-time but on the phone quite a bit as things ramp up for the trial in December.  The flexibility of half-time and remote access has been very pleasant…Mark can get a lot done without sitting in the office and wasting time driving back and forth. 

Late in the month, the Henkels left early in the morning for a business meeting in Platteville and then drove up along the Mississippi to attend the inauguration of Lance Pliml, Wood County chairman, as the president of the Wisconsin Counties Association.  Fall color is coming slowly this year, but La Crosse is a lovely city and always great to visit there, even so briefly.  Hilde had one day on tour, away from kitchen work, seeing robotic milkers, shoreland preservation, soil judging sites, the Marshfield airport and other projects of the county.  Despite all the complaints about local and national governments, there is a lot of good work going on.

At the end of the month, with garden work almost done, chores list mostly complete, and three Packers wins to enjoy, Mark and Hilde, like so many others were outside watching the eclipse of the supermoon, but some of the sunsets for the month were really spectacular like this one on September 25.

 

Fantastic sunset