Leaves, Leaves, Leaves

Sunday, October 16, 2022

The leaves are spectacular. I cannot say it enough. I know that no pictures will do it justice and that it is hardly groundbreaking information, but I wish the magical feeling we had all weekend of winning the autumn lottery could seep out to you. Barbara and Jerry took off fairly early for their nine-hour journey back to Michigan. We slowly gathered our belongings (big room means more places to put stuff) (oh, I just popped a picture of our room in and have to mention that behind the stained-glass windows are other stained-glass windows. When you are outside, you see entirely different pictures. Huh) and walked downtown Bayfield once more. Bayfield is about 4 blocks long, so I didn’t think it would be a big endeavor. We found a fun store we hadn’t visited and spent quite a bit of time just poking around looking at gadgets and funny shirts and soup mixes. Keith bought a Bourbon sauce – for people who don’t really drink alcohol, Bourbon is our go-to flavor – very hard to resist.

We stopped at Andy’s Groceries, because Keith thought he needed to have a beef tornado (none available – sadness) and we were looking for pepperoni sticks. I wasn’t feeling great yesterday and fell asleep the minute we got back to our room (unintentionally. I asked Keith what he thought the potd should be and he showed me the picture on his phone. I agreed, then started to snore – according to him. He decided to take care of it himself rather than wake me up. He is very nice), so I did not get a chance to tell you the Trinko’s story.

At breakfast yesterday, Mark (the current manager of the Rittenhouse and son of Jerry and Mary) was our server. We enjoyed many short conversations with him as he brought us our food. After we finished eating, we lingered, and he stopped again to chat. One thing led to another, and he was telling us about awesome pepperoni sticks made by a nearby company. Keith interrupted (politely) and said when he was a teenager he visited the Washburn/Ashland area with a family friend and was taken to a small shop that made pepperoni sticks – and he had had the best meat stick he’d ever had. He had tried to find those sticks again – assuming they would be in shops around Wisconsin – but had never found the taste again. Mark went off and came back with a piece of meat stick for each of us and Voila! Keith is sure it is the right flavor, and more importantly, the right texture. How marvelous!! Jerry immediately googled up the hours and disappointedly informed us that Trinko’s is only open Tuesday – Friday. Tuesday through Friday? What? What is that? That is not okay? How can tourists get any? I immediately started planning our day-after-Thanksgiving drive to Bayfield, but Keith, of course, researched shipping. Ten dollars shipping will be much cheaper than the four-hour drive – and we can order it on Tuesday. (There isn’t even internet ordering – you have to call. I kinda love these people).

We stopped to take a couple leaf pictures on our way out of town…which led to hiking down a hill and walking a boardwalk and foraging through some trees (obviously). The leaves! The leaves! You just cannot imagine.

We drove home through Wisconsin, where the leaves were a complete disappointment. As we drove south, the leaves turned much more brown and sad. We stopped to visit friends’ on the way home and had a great, overdue visit. We arrived home about 8:30pm. Our thermostat said it was 54 degrees in the house, so we decided it was time to turn on the furnace for the season. We cooked some spaghetti and watched Survivor, and now it is time to go to bed so I can be ready to tackle 9th graders tomorrow (no, not actually tackle them. I am old. I would break. They would blink, and not notice I had fallen on the ground and broken).