Madison Trip

I didn't want to stop Blogging, so I'll continue with a delayed post on my trip to Madison.

As usual, it was awesome to return home and spend some time in my college town, which contains so many happy memories, ones which I continue to build. It started with a stop in my home town of West Bend after a flight to Milwaukee, coming in at around 1 AM and crashing in the bed housed by the room that my sister used to sleep in. A room which still has some glow in the dark stickers on the ceiling of stars and a moon, something which seems to give me a little bit of comfort before I drift off to sleep.

I rose in the morning around 8:30 AM, half suprising my mother who expected me to be sleeping in a little later after such a late night. I was excited to get going though with my short vacation. My brother, mother and I took a little ride to Sandy's cafe in Barton, WI a little smidge of a town on the outskirts of bustling West Bend. It's a place my great, great granparents actually used to live, way back in the day. My great grandfather was a shoe maker there, is what my mom as told me. By synchronicity, she found her way back to the neighboring town, all the way from Mankato, Minnesota, a seven hour drive away. I guess we some times tend to go back to our roots.

We walked into the Sandy's greeted by a friendly smile by the lone waitress there. We sat ourselves down at a middle table. What I noticed about the locals right away is that a few of them were smoking, which is not seen in California. What a wonderful law that I'm hoping makes its way to all necks of the woods. Who wants to taste smoke with their meal? Anyway, my eyes found themselve on the chalkboard behind the counter, which displayed the daily specials, one of which was eggs benedict, perhaps my my all-time favorite breafast. I had to go for it and so did my brother. We ordered the specials with large chocolate milks, Mike going for the home fries and I went for the hashbrowns. My mom went for scrambled eggs with some home fries and a coffee. When we had consumed all of this, the damage turned out to be a paltry $17.57. Gotta love midwest living.

After running some errands my mom and I packed our stuff and headed to Madison, which meant heading west on hwy 33 and then south on 151. As we were driving there, I decided I'd like to head to my favorite shoe store, which is west of the Mad town in a town called Black Earth. It's a very scenic drive as you get off the hwy and head to Black Earth, a drive in a rural area of steep hillsides, not commonly found in Wisconsin. If we continued west past the shoe store, we would run into Spring Green, a beatiful part of the state and former home of Frank Lloyd Wright, a place where he started an architect school called Taliesin. Spring Green also has a nice outdoor theater where I had gone to a couple plays in high school, King Lear and Enemy of the People, both starring a man by the name of Randall Duk Kim, an actor who eventually has found himself in a few movies, the most famous being "The Matrix" where he played the role of "The Key Maker" in the second film. What's strangely coincidental of my encountering of this of actor during my highschool years is that he had attended high school in Hawaii with a very good friend of mine's mother. Supposedly it was a very small high school and she remembers him tugging on her hair as boys have been known to do.

Well, I need to end here actually because its late and I need to go to bed. I'll continue on the riveting details of my Madison trip next time, which I hope is tomorrow...