The family and I travelled north this weekend to spend a couple nights on Madeline Island. It happened to coincide with Bayfield’s Applefest, which was a fortuitous circumstance as we had never been, but I have heard tons about it. Bayfield is a pituresque town on the south shore of Lake Superior, which seems to be an eclectic mix of ex-hippies and farmers. As you’ll see from the photo’s the Fall colors were in full bloom.
The cabin we stayed at on Madeline Island was allegedly “waterfront,” which apparently means lake superior is
about 75 yards away through some trees and across the road (photo to the right). However, the beach was the best damn beach I’ve ever seen on Lake Superior. Quite stunning. I was told the beach in the state park on the Island is the significantly better than any other place on the Island, but this was such a short visit we didn’t get a chance to see it up close. From a distance it looked to be a very deep beach, similar to what you would expect to see from an Ocean beach and not a Lake beach.
Ashby turned 9 months old on this trip and had some other milestones. It was the first time she was ever on a boat. She had previously stayed in a cabin and has been to Wisonsin before. To date she has been to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and California. She has already flown twice by now. She will be flying again when we go to California at the end of October again. KMWorld is in San Jose and rather than missing Ashby’s first Halloween we’re going to spend Halloween with Julie (my sister) and the Ekstroms.
As we walked around Bayfield on Saturday, which was packed with people, I stumbled across this fellow wearing a MindTouch Tshirt!! Ok, so it’s really my father in law. Although, I was recently related a story by a friend of mine in which he and his wife were in the Badlands camping when someone recognized the MindTouch shirt his wife was wearing and excitedly proclaimed: “hey I know those guys!” Evidently our brand has developed some equity as I have heard similar stories to this more than a few times. The setting is usually an urban one though.
There was this band playing music at Bayfield that got my attention when they announced they were from North Carolina. I’m unclear as to what their band name was, but they were quite good. I’m not sure if they were called “Bus”, “Big Pretty” or “Red Rockets.” Anyway, they had a suuuper unique sound. It was like ska fused with hip-hop with a tinge of folk/rock, and I’m certain I even heard a blue grass influence in a couple songs. Sounds weird, but it worked. At any rate, it turns out the fellow on the Cello (to the right) graduated two years earlier than me from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Computer Science program. Apparently after a stint at IBM he decided to pursue music full-time. We even had mutual friends, he knew Matt McCallus and John Crouch (Matt is at Red Storm still, I think, and John I believe is a full-time musician now). Crazy.
In general, it was a good mini-mini-vacation. If you do make it to Madeline Island definitely stop by the “Island Oasis” bar on a weekend night after 9pm. It’s a trippy local hang-out that is open only in the Summer and Fall (I’m told). Kind of hard to describe, but certainly worth stopping at.
Aaron Fulkerson 