When: end of June
Miles driven: 1009.3
Price of gas: 3.18 to 3.39
Interest: Water ski
High point: Aerial class or Our Lady of Champion
Low point: Two nights of rain while camping in forested area.
Environment: Smells like cows
One thing learned: Little Miss Muffet was eating cheese and drinking a cheese by-product, or more simply, she had curdled milk.
I have finally reached the land of cheese, Wisconsin! I'm not a big fan of cheese, two slices of cheese on a burger is one too many. When people hear I'm going to Wisconsin, they say, "be sure to try the cheese curds". So I did. I have to report that they are squeaky, and the squeak is their best part! At Scray Cheese, in De Pere (one of the Fox Cities) I talked with Kayla, her and her brother are the fourth generation of the Scray family to make cheese. They specialize in Gouda and Cheddar cheese and use milk from local farms. The shoppe is connected to their factory with viewing windows for visitors to watch the action. When I visited, workers were dicing the freshly made cheese into curds and adding salt. (video below) Cheese curds are newly made (not aged, you could say juvenile) cheddar cheese that has not yet been pressed into blocks. And like most juveniles, curds are sort of cheesy, just like this joke. (I tried.)
Another thing in the Fox Cities area, the cities surrounding the Fox River, I wanted to see was water skiing! I have never tried, nor am interested in trying water skiing, but I wanted to watch a performance or two. There are two groups in the area,
Webfooters Water Ski and
Waterboard Warriors. One group's performances were canceled due to recent heavy rains making the Fox River too high to safely ski on. The other group seemed unaffected by the rain, perhaps because their ski location is a smaller river connected to small-ish Partridge Lake. I was grateful, because it meant I still got to watch one performance! The performance was not as exciting as I expected. Boats pulled skiers past the audience in alternating directions and some skiers did flips, but there is a lot of waiting involved. A group would go past and maybe after a bit return for a 2nd pass. But then the audience waited as the current group or a next group set up their lines and formations with the boat and then hopefully skied past. If a skier lost balance or dropped their pull line, the whole group stopped and they restarted. A few times they attempted a pyramid from the dock (rather than building the pyramid as they moved on the water), but it never held up under the forces of being pulled onto the water. At the end of a successful run, it was neat to watch the performers let go of their lines and slowly sink into the water.
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Queen of Heaven as described by Adele
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While visiting WI, I learned about the
National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, just northeast of Green Bay. Located on the site where Adele Brise, a Belgium immigrant, saw Mary the Queen of Heaven in 1859, the chapel and oratory bring visitors into this special moment. Our Lady appeared to Adele three times, giving her a message during the last visit when Adele gathered her courage and asked, "In God's name, who are you, and what do you want of me?" Adele was given a mission to pray for the conversion of sinners, and to teach the children of the area their catechism and about the sacraments. For many years after, Adele traveled by foot from house to teach the children, sometimes doing house work for the family in exchange to be allowed to teach their children. Over time other women joined Adele's work and a boarding academy, then school, chapel and convent were built in the community.
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Church-confirmed Marian apparition sites
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I found it interesting that this shrine is the only Church approved/confirmed Marian apparition site in the United States and that it happened 58 years before the more well known visitation in Fatima, Portugal. There are many opportunities throughout the day at the shrine to receive the sacrament of Reconciliation, and join the community in devotional prayers. The History Center also has letters of visitors' personal experiences of the shrine and how it healed them from their medical infirmities. Visiting the shrine two days was a lovely experience for me.
Wisconsin is the 50th state I've visited and thus the end of this trip! I am glad to be done and I look forward to not traveling for awhile. Upon arriving home, my sister asked me if I felt accomplished. My answer was no. I don't feel accomplished because the challenges and joys of visiting all 50 states were drawn
out over a year and eight months and many challenges were those of daily life. On your birthday, do you feel older? Or is feeling older a gradual change that is often unnoticed? Visiting all 50 states is like that. I cannot
clearly remember/look back over all I have done and struggled with to
fully appreciate what I've accomplished. But I can remember smaller moments throughout my journey that left an impression and are still dear to me even now. Some of those moments I will share with you next week in my last blog post, "Summary".
Pyramid and flips:
