The fairgrounds hosts a flea market once a month and closes the campgrounds for the flea market. I don’t know why they do this. The fairgrounds has plenty of room and they easily could set up road blocks or signage keeping the flea market buyers and vendors away from the campers. Regardless, we were told we needed to leave on Thursday and find another place to be.
“Why did this happen?” asked Ari when normally I have our itinerary so well planned out. Well, everything in Wisconsin and Michigan shuts down during the winter and nobody answers the phones. So, I had to plan our Wisconsin and Michigan itinerary without any real confirmation that we could stay some places. We were looking for a place to rendezvous with our son, his wife, and grandson. Lake Geneva looked like a nice location. The Timber Ridge Lodge looked ideal to entertain our grandson. So, I booked the Timber Ridge Lodge. On line, the fairgrounds allowed me to book a campsite online for every day I wanted, except Thursday night. I figured it was a glitch on the website and I would be able to resolve it if I could only speak to a live human being. After all, whoever heard of a fairgrounds campground closing, unless there was some serious big event going on and I didn’t see anything in their events section.
The Timber Lodge was booked and the flight was booked, I needed to find a soft place to land for our horses. I looked for places to boondock (hah!) I reached out to my equestrian network. I finally connected with a local resident in Lake Geneva who runs a boarding stable. She isn’t really interested in being a horse motel, but she took pity on us. She charged us $100/night for the two horses in a pasture and for a parking spot for the LQ with electric hook-up. She even sold us some hay at $6/bale. The horses got a large pasture area with an electric fence. This was a nice change after four days at the fairgrounds cooped up in small stalls.
This allowed us to spend an extra day with our grandson, Zane, and his parents before they continued their vacation, driving down to Chicago. Outside the resort, we would pass this tree with a fairy door. I pointed it out to Zane and he wanted to know why someone would put a door like this on a tree. I told him that fairies lived inside the tree or maybe leprechauns. Maybe they had a treasure or pot of gold hidden in the tree. Of course, he was quite excited about the prospect of hidden treasure. So, then every time we passed the tree he wanted to stop and look for the treasure. Temperatures were pretty high in the 90s, so nobody wanted to stop and look for this treasure except for Zane. To placate him, I said I would check it out and let him know. So, here is the video of me seeing what’s behind the door.
It was a real treat getting to spend time with family. We see our son, Daniel, and his fiancée in August. In the meantime, we are back on the road, traveling through Wisconsin.
So far, we really like Wisconsin. The food is excellent. The people are friendly. We just wish the weather would cool down a bit so we could get more trail riding in.