Monthly Archives: October 2024

Driftless 2024

What a time! We went down to the LaCrosse, Wisconsin area for vacation again and it was amazing. The driftless is such a wonderful place filled with fun hikes, neat amish things, and, reasonably priced lodging and food.

I think this is the third year we’ve skipped the north shore. Far too many people. The costs were disproportionately high compared to what we received. I’m happy we found a new place for our fall trips!

Overall, this year was a lot like last year. Drove to Pikes Peak State Park in Iowa, visited a lot of Amish bakeries, swam a lot, hiked a bit, and, enjoyed the good weather.

Biggest conclusions this year: 1) we actually only like one Amish bakery located in Iowa. Next year I think we’re going to stay nearby, 2) the day of the dead celebration surrounded by farm fields seven miles east of the tiny town of Viola was amazing. How lucky we were to find such a place to have fun. It was surreal.

The Amish items were still fabulous deals. An entire homemade apple pie for $10, 40lbs of honey crisp apples for $18, and so on. We were lucky we were able to find so many wonderful things to purchase!

La Crosse is an interesting town in of itself. The town is only 50,000 or so people but the metro area is 170,000, so, the services, lodging, and, restaurants the town offers is disproportionate to it’s size. We love visiting the La Crosse area!

Until this year, I had not realized one of the reasons why I like the La Crosse area so much – it’s because it’s another place that has the “this was something important at one time” feel like the South East of the USA and other post-industrial areas of the US I’ve visited. I really like visiting these types of areas because these places were once far more important than they are now and they have all the evidence to prove it.

Once again, we were too early for the fall colors and the fall colors occurring weren’t great due to the drought. Instead of turning beautiful shades of yellow and red, the leaves were just crumpling and shriveling up. Oh well, not a huge deal since everything else was so awesome.

Enjoy the photos!

Colorado 2024

We went on two hikes this year! The beautiful Loch Lomond trail and the extremely busy Aspen Alley Trail in Breckenridge.

The weather was perfect – absolutely still and sunny. We reached the lakes around Loch Lomond in the early morning and we had a fabulous time watching the alpen-glow reflections off the lakes. Colorado is the only place I’ve been where I can consistently take reflection photos and turn the image upside down while still having photos make sense – there is such a lack of wind and creatures that the water is completely still.

We had the Loch Lomond trail to ourselves, we were so very fortunate. We left Denver early in the morning and reached the trailhead quite a bit before sunrise. We had a chance to take some beautiful photos of the night sky with our iphones before astronomical dawn ended and the world started to brighten. The trail itself was pretty OK and had a ‘make your own adventure’ aspect once we reached the lakes above Lake Lomond. It was fun to traipse around and enjoy the sunrise & see the last of the summer flowers.

I felt very, very, very lucky that my visit corresponded to near peak fall colors in the Breckenridge area. The scenery was absolutely stunning and the hiking trail below the aspens was incredible. The Aspen Alley trail was very nice and we had a pleasant time even though we were joined by about 1,000 fellow hikers soaking in the scenery.

That night a large weather system hit the areas we hiked and dumped a bunch of snow. The hikes we did wouldn’t have been possible one day later than we had originally planned. We were very, very, very lucky!

All in all, this was another 10/10 trip to Colorado!

Enjoy the photos!