A Evening in La Crosse

Welcome to the first addition of Tales From the Road! I'm sure this is the first of many more to come. I hope you enjoy my rendition of events from my travels...which may or may not be 100% factual.

Getting to Aquinas High School was definitely a journey to remember. It was my first night on the road as an admission advisor for UWP, and I'd have to say honestly that it was the actual act of being on the road that was the most exciting part of the night.

Stacie and I went together as sort of a practice run for me...well, both of us, as she had only done one other fair before. It was nice to have a travel buddy, but it would have been even more nice to have a camera and a travel buddy.

The night started out passing three strange and slightly creepy animal statues on the path. The first was a giant mouse holding cheese in Fennimore that Stacie lovingly referred to as a giant rat. Then we noted shortly after a very large bird statue, and in the town that came shortly after, there was a happily roaring lion. Stacie promptly encouraged me to stick my head in its mouth. I thought about it but decided that it would only be worth it in conjunction with a photo op. with all three creepy animals.

A friendly detour met us as we neared La Crosse. At this point we were both starving, a little cranky, and only slightly stir-crazy from being in the car on an exceptionally curvy road for two hours. A detour was not on either of our top-ten list of want-to-do's. And as we passed through what ended up being quite possibly the strangest detour (that went in a complete circle in a small town) I made a split-second decision to take a different road...off the detour. County K. Now, I would highly doubt that this road was worse that the actual detour, but it was pretty darn curvy...the kind of curvy road that has big boulders jutting out of the massive hills on either side...the kind of curvy road that max's out the speedometer at about 40. We were less than thrilled.

But, alas, finally we arrived at our destination. Ok, so we were on the wrong side of the building, asking small children for directions to the main door, and just barely in time for dinner, but we were there. And we got pasta. So all was well...until..."the mom."

A very seemingly nice mom came up to our table to ask us a few questions. She had a son that was a senior that had just sent in his application. She had so many questions that she wasn't even letting us answer her questions before moving on the next, obviously life-or-death question. Forty minutes later, the guy from one table over walked up to me and commented, "She sure gave you an ear-full," to which I just nodded as I was very sick of talking by then.

All in all, four pseudo-interested students filled out information cards for us and asked us a few general questions, but that was all the actual fair action that the two of us got. Way to go us.

The ride home proved to be a little more exciting than the ride up...well, until Stacie fell asleep on me. Then I was pretty much on my own. We, again, decided to veer off the well-trod path of the marked detour to pass through such exciting towns such as Romance and Bud. We actually missed Bud, but that's neither here nor there. Passing through Romance, Stacie took the time to convince me that we were for sure going to die by the hand of a masked murderer that was about to jump over the guard rail and into our car. A dense fog and lack of cell phone service, as well as an unidentified lurching of the car during acceleration, solidified the senario and guaranteed our impending doom. I'm happy to report that we missed the murderer by just seconds and escaped unharmed....and the rest is history.