The Easter Weekend

[vakkotaur]

The original plan was that I'd drive to Merrill on Friday, pick up jmaynard at Central Wisconsin Airport a bit after noon on Saturday, and we'd stay for at least part of a big gathering on Sunday before heading back to Minnesota. Plans tend to change, and that one did.

I got a slightly earlier start than I'd expected Friday, which suited me fine, and set off for Merrill, WI. The trip was mostly uneventful. The bracket which I am going to use to mount the XM set hadn't (and still hasn't) arrived and I think I might need go through the manual for the thing again. It seems to forget settings but it hasn't been predictable about it. That was a minor annoyance. Even so, having XM was nice. I listened to a few old radio shows or to 40s music when there was a show I didn't much care for. The digital recorder part of the set is nice. After I got a phone call, I could just "rewind" and finish listening to a show. I goofed though, and didn't hit the "pause" when the call came in, so I wound up listening to a few minutes of the show twice.

There was an accident on the way up to Minneapolis, but it happened before I got there, so it was just a matter of slowing down and dealing with a short stretch of single lane traffic. There was also some construction, but nothing too bad. I-94 just west of Menominee however was down to a single lane per direction for a few miles and that caused a back up for several miles.

I got to Merrill in the afternoon and after unpacking some and resting a bit, we (the folks & I) went out for supper. I had a fish fry, or part of one, which was the first one in some time. After that I took a few pictures with Jay's old digital camera and copied them to the laptop. That works rather well. Though looking at them last night I might go to a higher resolution and see if that work better or if I need to copy stuff off of the memory card too often then.

Saturday morning we visited my grandmother and then took her out for a bit of shopping. We also invited her to supper since on the drive to Merrill jmaynard called to tell me his schedule had changed and we wouldn't be able to stay for the big family gathering on Sunday.

Around noon I drove down to the Central Wisconsin Airport in Mosinee to pick up Jay. There's some construction going on there, but it had a pleasant side effect for me: no parking fees. I arrived early and so did Jay, so I wasn't waiting very long. On the way back we stopped at the KFC/Taco Bell combination place so I could see the place. It's somewhat hidden out of the way, and the way it looks it might be just well. Ku's Wokery moved into the old KFC location. Another change was pointed out to me Friday. A rather awkward intersection no longer has "right turn no stop" in one direction. That's probably good as from that direction there are two different ways to turn right.

I took a number of pictures, but most of them were of the general area since I had the opportunity. I'll probably put a few them up on the web once I decided which ones to show and in what order.

Supper was good, a nice small gathering. It wasn't a standard Easter dinner, but that would happen Sunday afternoon for most folks so it wasn't any big deal.

Sunday I drove back to Minneapolis and dropped Jay off at the airport so he could get a shuttle ride back to his car at a Park & Fly place of some sort and then we drove back to Fairmont separately. We stopped for lunch at different times and places, but ended up getting back home at the same time.