Critters

After a heavy downpour last night we woke up this morning to a chilly 49 degrees.  It was heavenly!  After packing we headed downtown to the Red Wing shoe store.  Buy two, get one free.  Terry got his one, I got my two.......sounds fair, doesn't it?  It was actually a very nice store and the people were friendly.

So....we head across state to Eagle River, WI.  It took all day long!  Again we passed thru many small towns as we were going the backway.  And, as yesterday, they were all very interesting and very pretty.  Everything seems so clean up here, but I'm sure that's because as the snow melts, everything is picked up or pushed aside by snowplows or whatever.

Binoculars and cameras were at the ready today as we traveled along.  Terry and Dave spotted our first surprise today at the same time.

Banded Trumpeter Swans (the two big ones have yellow bands on their necks)

Dave tells us there are not that many trumpeter swans around and that it is rare to see them.  And to top it off, just a few miles down the road we saw more.  That gave us a total of 9 swans we saw today!

As we drove along thru WI we saw more and more dairy cattle farms.  We even saw a llama farm.  And we continued to see, guess what......corn!  After awhile we left both corn and cattle and just saw hardwoods.  The leaves are beginning to turn bright reds and golds.  The maples are just outta sight pretty!  We saw plenty of evergreens, too.  Many houses had barriers of Christmas tree size evergreens planted around their homes to ward off the winter winds.  I just can't imagine.  When we stopped for lunch, it was at a local golf club.  We asked the lady when would they close the greens.  She replied when it snows, probably next month.  She shuddered as did a patron behind her.  They had sad looks on their faces.  It must be really bad when it snows up here.

We were almost to Eagle River when we did a detour to go to another nature area.  It was way beyond being in the boonies.  But somehow there were people living in those areas and there were many many bars back in the woods.  And some kind of biker run was being held.  There were motorcycles all back in those woods, especially at all the bars.  It was bizarre!  Anyway, we traveled along and finally found a new thing:  loons.  In fact we saw nine loons today.  We also saw 11 turkeys today just crossing the road in front of us.  We would have to slow down to keep from hitting them as they crossed over.    Cool.

We are in Eagle River tonight, heading up to Copper Harbor, Michigan tomorrow night.  Copper Harbor is the northernmost point of Highway 41, which runs right thru Tifton.  Neat, huh?