Visiting The Love Garden One Last Time

Laura and I will be moving to Atlanta at the end of July and so in these last few weeks I'm visiting my favorite locations one last time. The best record store in Lawrence is the Love Garden and they are famous for having animals that live in the store. We're talking two Record Store Cats and a Record Store Dog as well. When I visited the store Sam was taking a nap on the dollar bins.

I bought some supplies to get my record collection ready for the move as well as a pin set in honor of the animals that live at the Love Garden. I've been eyeing these pins for years and had to get them before leaving Lawrence. 

Here are two of the records I picked up...A Righteous Brothers with the Bros starring off into the water while on a dock...

...and The Association who went a little crazy on the image fading on their cover.

Touring Lambeau Field

Back in June I got to take a tour of Lambeau Field for the first time. I've been to the stadium many times either just to take photos or to visit the Packer Pro Shop but I had never taken a stadium tour before. I had also hoped to visit the Packer Hall of Fame but it turned out that this summer it was temporarily relocated away from Lambeau as they are doing construction on a new Hall of Fame and Packer Pro Shop.

Here's some of the construction you can see while walking into the stadium. The construction should be done by the start of the season.  

Before the tour I stopped by the Pro Shop and saw this great display of Cheeseheads. Do a little research later I was surprised to find that the origin of these hats comes from the Milwaukee Brewers rather than the Packers. 

On to the tour which turned out to be exactly as I had hoped, run by two retired old guys that really really loved the Packers.

We go to go up to one of the high-priced executive boxes to view the field from above. While we were touring the ground keepers were mowing the field which is done every two days.

I entitled this photo "The loneliness of a Green Bay Packers groundskeeper."

We also go to go into the bowels of the stadium..."Player Entrance" this way...

...the home locker room is behind these doors. We didn't get a chance to see it for ourselves.

Players come out of the locker room and down through this hall to directly out on the field.

And as we walked onto the field they played recorded crowd cheers and the announcer's voice announcing the team's arrival onto the field. It was amazing to be able to be on the field after all these years. Well, we weren't on the field as really on the side of the field. If our guides mentioned it once, they mentioned it 10 times, we couldn't walk out onto the field.

They had these signs to remind us as well.

But while we were checking out the acoustics of the stadium by chanting "Go Pack Go" and listening for the echo all of a sudden someone started walking across the field. Our two guides looked at him and started making a move to intercept him and I imagined both of them tackling him like Clay Matthews in the middle of the field but thankfully they realized that that was the groundskeeper we saw earlier in the day mowing the lawn.

And of course it wouldn't be a Packer tour without poking some fun at the Vikings...although they are going to have to change this when the new Vikings Stadium which will have a fixed roof rather than a dome.

Wittenberg, Wisconsin's Packer Mural

In the middle of Wisconsin, in the town of Wittenberg you'll find Hanke's Sentry Foods...

...and on the side of that grocery store you'll find a wonderful Green Bay Packers mural. I noticed it as we were driving through town headed towards Nueske's, the great local meat market.

There's a lot to take in there so I'll break it down into smaller sections. First we have Don Hutson in the original navy blue and gold jerseys which founder Curly Lambeau borrowed from his alma mater Notre Dame.  

Next we have Curly Lambeau with his curly hair and the statue of Vince Lombardi this is in front of Lambeau Field. 

Cheeseheads and Jordy Nelson make an appearance. 

Next we have a Packers center with a strategically placed security light. 

Next we have a giant sized Donald Driver doing the Lambeau Leap along with what I think is another Donald Driver wearing the away jersey. 

The last section highlights the long standing tradition of having Packers players ride kid's bicycles as they go back and forth between the training facilities and Lambeau Field. Here's a great collection of photos showing Packer greats borrowing mountain bikes through the years. 

The Graffiti of the Bridges of Madison County

Two common themes of this blog are graffiti and bridges. The two merge seamlessly while we visited the Bridges of Madison County. I visited the Bridges previously during a family vacation in the 1990's and I remember being surprised to find "Where's Clint?" spray painted on the inside of one of the bridges. I don't quite understand it myself but many people treat the bridges as we did in Kharkiv and use it as a way to express your unending love for someone...or Justin Bieber...

...or the movie "Bridges of Madison County"...

...or maybe some free form poetry...

...or maybe you've come a long way to Iowa and you want to express itself...

...you can't go wrong expressing your love for the troops...

...or you can always draw a graffiti classic but not quite the right way.

Winterset, Iowa Pt. 2

If you slightly adjust the angle of the first photo of the Winterset water tower in Pt. 1 of my Winterset, Iowa post you will notice the street sign reads John Wayne Drive. And rightfully so the main road through Winterset is named after its favorite son. 

Winterset is currently constructing a new John Wayne Museum which will take up two city blocks and will completed in early summer 2015. John Wayne's birthplace itself is a very unimposing single-story house which has a nice little gift shop attached to it.

And parked down the street is this great van. 

Taking a look at the side of the van you'll find a great paint job featuring John's famous role as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Here's the famous scene with Robert Duvall.

After getting our fill of The Duke we moved onto Winterset's other main attraction, the Bridges of Madison County. There are six bridges remaining and we ended up visiting three of them. The Cedar Bridge is the only bridge that you can drive through and so we made a little video of us driving through.



My comment in the video about burning down the bridge was in reference to the Cedar Bridge actually being burned down in 2002 by arson. The bridge that you drive through today was rebuilt using period materials and techniques in 2004. 

Winterset, Iowa Pt. 1

Yes, you read that title correctly. I need more than one post to cover visiting a city of a little more than 5,000 people in the middle of Iowa. You see, as far as small towns go Winterset, Iowa hit the jackpot of tourist attractions. Not only do they boast John Wayne's birthplace [and upcoming John Wayne Museum] this Madison County town also has many of the famous Bridges of Madison County surrounding it. I'll be highlighting those two attractions in a future post, today we have a couple of interesting alternative Winterset sites.

In the center of town there is the lovely Madison County Courthouse built in 1876. 

Directly across the street from the courthouse is this great movie theater called the Iowa Theater. It recently had a campaign to upgrade their projection to digital projection and they often have interesting movie themes like John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara films. 

Over at the Chamber of Commerce office/gift shop they have a TV showing "The Bridges of Madison County" during business hours.

I also found in there gift shop a pile of these great Winterset Dairy caps. I especially love the old phone number "529."

Pysanky Egg Making At KU

Roughly a year ago Laura and I got to visit the Pysanky Museum in Kolomyia, Ukraine and it was my second favorite museum from our travels in Ukraine behind the Cosmonaut Museum. And so yesterday Laura and I had the opportunity to learn how to make pysanky at KU.  

The first step was to draw on your design onto the egg. We were told that when designing the egg it's best to use raw eggs and then after it is complete you can remove the yolk. When drawing on your design try to do it as lightly as possible.

We picked the design in the right corner for our egg. It's a pretty basic with lots of straight lines. 

Our egg with the design added.

Then using a tool called a kitska you put melted beeswax on the areas you would like to keep white. 

If you know Laura then you can guess which color we dyed the egg. 

As you can see the beeswax stops the dye from reaching the egg shell. 

Here is the dried egg after dying. If you are going to use multiple colors it's important to go from light to dark on the color spectrum. 

When you are done dying you can melt the beeswax off the white areas.

Here are some of the completed eggs done by our pysanky guru Megan. Maybe with a little practice we can someday make eggs as half as good as this. If you are interested in doing some pysanky yourself you can find all the tools you'll need HERE.