... but I finally managed to complete the rental car reservation for our imminent Florida Keys vacations. I rented from Enterprise through the Chase Travel Portal using my CSP, (the only credit card that provides primary CDW/LDW rental insurance). I was hoping I could find what I wanted through Chase, but it took me several passes through their search engine to master the intricacies. Turns out there's a class of vehicle called "Compact SUV" that sounds like just what we want. Priced like a compact, but apparently shaped like a little minivan: higher off the ground for easy entry/exit and easy to load. Anyway, that's my hope. At $497 for 6 days it was slightly more expensive than a Nissan Versa, but not by much. And I was able to pay for it with Ultimate Rewards points, which is another plus. 

What I learned along the way.

• The price of the exact same rental varies MASSIVELY from portal to portal and rental agency to rental agency. The prices turned up by Costco Travel were jaw-droppingly high, more than twice the cost of the other search engines I tried. Their lowest offering was a Nissan Versa for $1175!!!  The portals offered by private loyalty programs were the best (Delta and Chase). 
• When searching for a car, don't specify the size of the car. You never know exactly how they are going to classify (or price) individual vehicles and you just might miss the best deal. 
• Searching for one-way rentals is always possible, but full of pitfalls. On Delta Cars you can't specify the drop-off location until the second search screen. On Chase you can specify it whenever you want, but sometimes the "different dropoff" just disappears between searches. 
• Be sure to sort the results in order of price, not the stupid default (which is usually something like "Recommended," which apparently means "most expensive"). It took me 3 passes through the Chase portal to figure this out, and then I found exactly what I was looking for (Enterprise, which was much cheaper than the competition, floated to the top with just the type of vehicle I wanted). 
• Kayak is incomprehensible. I guess it is just a comparison engine, not one that actually completes a rental for you? It kept shifting me off to different places, like Expedia (which immediately tried to upsell me) and some squikky outfit that wouldn't tell me the name of the rental company until I agreed to rent from them (really??? What if it is Hertz?). After each dead-end I had to back up and reenter my rather complicated search criteria. I gave up and went back to search engines that remembered at least some of it. 
• Be sure to check the cancellation policy. Most of the recommendations from Kayak were non-refundable. 
• Double and triple-check the pickup and dropoff locations before confirming. I almost rented a car with a dropoff at some military base  because I accidentally selected "Key West" instead of "Key West International Airport" from the dropdown list.  Yikes!  

See my last post if you are wondering why I am posting a picture of a giant troll.

The award for Most Gravitas goes to Long Lief (or as all the other troll hunters called him, "The Tall One.")  


And if troll hunting isn't a good enough reason to drive all the way to northwest Minnesota: you can also visit the World's Largest Turkey in Frazee. If you like this kind of thing, be sure to look up the whole turkey story on the irreplaceable Roadside America website.

Hot enough to induce me to swim in the Willamette River. Upriver from Portland, but still...

Parking was scarce, as was beach shade, but we lucked out on both. Had a great time. Tried out the new inflatable raft. Picnicked on Subway sandwiches. Everybody came home and collapsed. 

The first escape was from the Shedd Aquarium, which seemed worth the pain at first but eventually became an intolerable cacophony of crowds and noise and humidity (for me, anyway. Richard doesn't care as long as he can see everything). Breaking out into the fresh marine air of the Museum Campus itself was a huge relief, except that I was desperately thirsty. And then we came around a corner and there was a glorious juice cart selling tropical fruit drinks embellished with pineapple, cherries, and little umbrellas! Honestly, that mango pineapple smoothie was the high point of the day so far. It was also located just outside the elusive east entrance to the Field Museum, which we had been searching for (closed off main entrances being kind of the theme of the day). 

Thus refreshed, we finally we got to my favorite museum, the stately Field Museum of Natural History. I have always loved these places: the Peabody Museum in New Haven, the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Milwaukie Public Museum. The classical architecture, the vaulted ceilings that dissipate noise instead of amplifying it, the dinosaur skeletons and giant elephants that always adorn the main hall. I was happy to just relax and gaze at the ceiling for awhile, but Richard wandered off and came back with reports of dioramas in the Hall of Mammals.


I just LOVE classic nature dioramas with their skillful taxidermy and lovingly hand-painted backgrounds. I even love the way they start out in kind of random order as the dioramicists plied their art on whatever the intrepid museum exploration teams of the era brought back with them. So here's some white tail deer.  Here's some African anteaters. Here's some tapirs.  Here's some mountain goats. 


And here's a rare type of Alaskan bear called a Glacier Bear that I've never heard of. But wait, there's more!  And more and more and more and MORE!!  There are hundreds of dioramas, arranged along a multitude of twisting and branching corridors. Just when you think that you might be getting back to the main hall you realize  that it is just a whole new wing of dioramas, now arranged by continent. We have only 25 minutes to get back to our bus stop for the last hop-on bus of the day and we are completely lost. We encounter other people, all of whom are also lost. The museum is closing soon and we wonder how many tourists end up spending the night here. But finally we see the glimmer of natural light in the distance and find our way back to the multiple skylights of the main hall. whew  I'm glad we got to the dioramas, but I think I've had my fill of them for a while.


Then we get to the real adventure - getting back to our hotel. We made it to the bus stop in plenty of time, but the bus doesn't come. There are some city buses nearby, but all marked Out of Service. Increasingly large groups of people wearing vaguely sports-team-like striped clothing are streaming by. Other passengers arrive with disturbing news. Due to some sort of soccer extravaganza taking place at the nearby stadium, all bus service has been blocked. We try to call a Lyft, but it clearly isn't working - we cannot get to the location where we are instructed to meet the driver. Other people try to call cabs of different types and get the same news - the Museum Campus is locked down! Cars can get in, but no public transportation. And the cars that have gotten in are just lined up in long lines outside the overfilled parking lots. 

At this point I am exhausted and defeated, so Richard uncharacteristically takes charge, declaring that if we just walk THIS WAY we will eventually get out of the Museum Campus and back to that busy north-south street we can see in the far distance. So we creep down a steep grassy slope and under a hulking underpass labeled Grant Park (which is the next gigantic lakeshore park to the north). We're probably less than 2 miles from our hotel, but we are already exhausted (not to mention old and arthritic).

Then on the other side of the underpass, our savior appears: a dashing Serbian pedicab driver who would be happy to take us not only 2 more parks to the north but all the way to our hotel door. He is friendly and cheerful, and it's a lovely ride through a lush green part of the lakeshore, with a touristy turn around the impressive Buckingham Fountain for good measure. I am not sure if pedicabs are actually supposed to be on the city streets, but when we get to the Art Institute he doesn't hesitate to dive into Chicago traffic, wheeling around cars and down the centerline occasionally, dropping us right at the hotel door. It was a little bit hair-raising, but he seemed perfectly self-assured so I guess he does this all the time. Anyway, it was an upbeat end to an intermittently frustrating day. 

The Navy Pier is the very essence of crass commercial tourism, but always turns out to be so much more fun than I think it will be. 10 years ago, on our first visit, we were astonished to discover an extensive but little-known stained glass museum (absolutely free!) tucked away at the far end of the pier. That's gone now, sadly. But this year's wonderful surprise was Flyover Chicago. Not free, but included in our Go City pass.

This Exciting New Attraction was hardly hidden away; it just didn't sound like that much fun: a short iMax movie with a few augmented reality touches. You. Have. No. Idea. You sit down in an ordinary row of theater seats with the view partially blocked by an annoyingly high railing. They make you put on a seatbelt, which seems dumb. The lights go down, the stars come out and lighted building tops appear in the dome. Then with a discreet little creak the railing slowly folds down and your jet chairs blast off into the Chicago skyline and straight down the side of a building!!! OMG, it is so real!  The seats have metal railings, which you hang onto for dear life. You know that your feet are on the floor but somehow they appear to be dangling helplessly as your jet chair careens around spiky rooftops, dives over streets where some kind of car chase mayhem is occurring, and zips through the spray of Buckingham Fountain. It was amazing!

Since the trip is less than 10 minutes long, the attraction is padded out with a waiting room full of engaging video clips and then a rousing pre-show in a small multi-screen theater that had me ready to abandon my former life, move to Chicago, and somehow learn to care about sports. But it's a little hard to remember how well-crafted that presentation was after the adrenaline rush of the jet-propelled seats.  

But you can't really capture Flyover with pictures, so here are a few random photos from the ever-photogenic Navy Pier.

Like The Bean only more cylindrical



I have no idea what that statue is but I liked the juxtaposition with the tourist in front of it.



And that appears to be an extrusion of the wonderful Children's Museum that has appeared sometime in the last 6 years. Either that or we somehow missed it when we took Lena there in 2018. 

Richard and I rode the Empire Builder to Chicago to use up some free Hilton nights at a Hilton hotel worth traveling for.

I managed to capture the iconic (blink and you miss it) shot of the Wisconsin Dells

As bibliophile quickly recognized, we stayed at the magnificent historic Palmer House, which is like staying in a museum of 19th century robber baron excess. In 1870 the obscenely rich Potter Palmer decided to build the Biggest Hotel in the World and present it to his new bride Bertha as a wedding gift so she could decorate it to her taste. A year later it burned to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire. Bummer. So they rebuilt it again, even better, this time with silver dollars embedded in the floors. Sadly, the silver dollar floors don't seemed to have survived the next massive renovation in the 1920s, but that's probably when they added the astounding array of art deco mirrors which are one of my favorite features. 


I think the hand-painted French ceilings are from the 1874 rebuild. I never get tired of extravagant ceilings.

So a text thread was going around among my female in-laws a couple of months ago along the lines of, "Hey, let's all get together for a weekend Craft Retreat!" They needed at least 10 people to sign up, so I impulsively said I'd come. I keep thinking it would be nice to get to know my very nice in-laws a little better - here's a chance to do it!  And since Richard and I skipped the state park tour last summer, driving across central Minnesota in the middle of winter sounded weirdly appealing to me. 

You know what a Craft Retreat is, right? It's when a bunch of people (mostly women, I'm guessing) rent a cabin or other quaint getaway spot and make quilts or something. This isn't one of those organized groups where everyone works on one project together - it's a Bring Your Own Craft (and maybe some leftovers from your liquor cabinet to share). I 'm thinking it's a lot like when the guys go Up North to the Hunting Shack, only with fewer guns and more show-offy quiches for breakfast.

I'm intermittently crafty, and it seemed like a long ways in the future when I signed up. Now it's NEXT WEEK and I need a craft in progress!! So I decided that I'd do some scrapbooking. I was pretty sure that some of the other ladies had  some experience with this and would be able to give me tips (and maybe some leftover materials). But mostly it was a way to make myself do something about the boxes and boxes of loose photographs and deteriorating albums scattered around the upper two floors of my house. 

So for the past week I have been lugging boxes up and down stairs and sorting sorting sorting. I have found many amazing things. Not only a few pictures of my childhood homes in distant states (something I had been looking for) but an amazing number of half-completed photo albums of various types. Most scrapbookers use enormous, unwieldy 12x12 albums that do not fit on any normal shelf and all look the same from the back anyway. I don't like that size, but I thought that's what you had to use, so I bought one at Michael's.

You can also get those awful magnetic page albums in various configurations, which are great when they are new but eventually dry up and start raining photos when you pick them up. I have a lot of those, some full, some empty, some in-between. But when I cleaned off the shelves in the office I discovered that some of the 8-1/2x11 size that I thought were pre-bound magnetic page are actually nice archival, post-bound albums that you can add pages to! I think that's what I really want to use. 

But I do have a use for that giant album. Those boxes of memorabilia that came to us when our respective mothers died have some wonderful old black and white photos that are way too big for the small albums. So I guess I'll use the big album for those. It's going to be a kind of thematic salad. Here's a Victorian-era portrait of a huge, glum-looking Swedish farm family (my ancestors). Here's one of Richard's Norwegian farm family during the 1930s, looking like something out of a Dorothea Lange exhibit. And here's a weirdly large print of me at age 5 with 2 of my younger siblings, all giggling adorably for the Sears photographer. But they all look GREAT on those 12x12 pages! 

I have now spent $150 at Michael's and Joann's on supplies, so I guess I'm committed. Anybody have any tips on scrapbooking?

Trip Advisor tipped me off to this great charity organization that pools donated Frequent Flyer miles and turns them into airline tickets for stranded refugees trying to get from staging areas to family members or new homes. Currently they are focusing on Afghan evacuees, but they have been around since 2016 helping other migrants. Seems to be legit.

So once the WPA finished constructing every park building they could think of, they decided that what this lake REALLY needed was for all the islands to be connected with stone causeways. So they did that. The one to Loon Island has been developed as a nature walk full of informative signs. From the first one we learn that there never were any loons around Loon Island, just cormorants, which the settlers misidentified and then proceeded to wipe out. So the upshot is, now there are neither loons nor cormorants on this lake, but there sure are a lot of stone causeways. This meandering lake is part of a huge glacial moraine so there were a lot of stones lying around to use as building material. 


The entry to that island looks like an enchanted forest, doesn't it? Which is how it must have looked to the early settlers, since all the land surrounding the lake was open prairie with only the islands forested. The settlers marveled at the big trees and then immediately chopped them all down

But according to the signage on the island, the forests have regenerated two or three times since then. First the original elms and ash and hackberry grew back, but when Dutch Elm Disease came for the elms the hackberries mysteriously died too (out of sympathy? Apparently nobody really knows). At which point the patient basswood and oak finally came into their own. Apparently the stolid, unflashy basswood has a forestry super power - it grows equally well in full sun or in shade. So when everything else dies out, there is always a crop of basswood coming up under the canopy, ready for their day in the sun. (You can tell from the signage that these islands are a forestry PhD's dream.) 

I started this summer's tour of state parks in search of a really good swimming beach, and finally found one. Lake Shetek is a surprisingly large and scenic recreational lake in the southwest corner of the state with a lovely Depression-era state park on the east side. The WPA really went nuts here, constructing not only the usual restrooms and picnic shelters but TWO entire group camps with bunkhouses and dining halls, and this spectacular bathhouse and swimming area. 


The bathhouse is really beautiful, fronted with a stone terrace and two long curved staircases sweeping down from the men's and women's discreetly separated dressing areas to meet at the shore. From the outside it looks perfect. Sadly, the changing booths have been left to deteriorate pending some vague future "renovation" (according to a passing janitor). The modern restrooms are in good shape, but I'm sure the architect of this graceful structure did not expect generations of future bathers to be changing into their swim clothes while standing on one foot in the toilet stalls. I was so distressed by the situation that I brought a broom from our cabin and swept out the women's side of the changing room so I could use it without standing on a carpet of acorns. If they ever get around to fixing that up I'd give this beach an A+ 


The lake is shallow and sandy, and this is the very definition of "easy entry."  The steps literally terminate in the sandy lake bottom. And there's even a handy place to sit on either side to take off your flip flops. The swim area is large and includes a huge lap swimming lane. The water was a little green, probably because the lake is never more than 10 feet deep. But it was plenty cold out past the first string of buoys and made for a very refreshing swim.