Discovering Madeline Island

I went to my family reunion early to check out a neighborhood I have been thinking about for years. The second family reunion, 10 or so years ago, was held in Washburn, Wisconsin and ever since then I have been dreaming of Bayfield and Madeline Island -- other cute little towns in the vicinity. This year I booked early to have a day or two up there . . . on the shores of Lake Superior, to check it out as a possibility.

You see . . . I'm thinking I need a bit more water view in my life. And, I have been really, really thinking about what my next step will be when Antarctica is done . . . which, I'm afraid, might be sooner than I would like to admit. Not because I'm doing a bad job. Not because The Program is going anywhere. Just because I might need to move on. Face other challenges. And I have been asking myself what are those next challenges going to be. Most folks who have been in The Program long enough, tend to stick with this kind of contract-hopping, over-seas-going, logistics-providing kind of stuff. Many go on to Iraq, China, Russia to work for large contractors who are providing large contracts to support whatever is going on.

Only after the smallest bit of thinking (Iraq?!), I decided I don't really want to go that route.

So what's left?

As I was thinking these career path/ family reunion thoughts . . . my day dreams turned to Bayfield -- running a liquor store or a great art gallery or an apple orchard. My hair all long and braided, my garden an acre big with corn and peppers and tomatoes and beans! My house will be a cutie pie Victorian with squeaky wooden floors and a huge wrap-around porch, perched high enough to look out over the Lake. I'll say "Oh, Yahhhh. You betchah" and have a great many friends who all come over for dinner! I'll take up quilting.

For the entire week before I left, I did very little work at work. Instead I surfed google images and shopped for real estate.

But you know what I found . . . It ain't going be Madeline Island. For one, you can't actually see the water when you're over there. Ok. From a few places in town and from one stretch of road on the east side of the island . . . but that's it. The whole place is forest, and dense forest at that. Road, dense forest and driveways down through the denseness to what we can only suspect are beautiful lake-front properties. The driveways pointing in lead to what we can only suspect are beautiful dense forest properties, deep in the forested middle. But you can't go down there or in there and see because all the signs say "No Trespassing. Keep Out." And the town isn't interesting enough. There are a few restaurants -- all of which are average -- a coffee shop, which is great, and that's about it. I couldn't live there year round. I couldn't probably spend more than about two days.

The greatest part of Madeline Island seems to be Tom's . . .