Historic Day

Today was a great day with the kids, we went over to the Grignon Mansion, Thousand Islands Nature Center, Heckrodt Nature Center, and ended up at Fratello's for dinner.

The mansion was closed, but we still took a few pictures.

The mansion was built in the last 1830's on land that was bought from the Menominee Indians in 1790. This sign tells a little of the story.

Nice price for almost 1300 acres. The real reason I came here was this.....

An outhouse. One of my friends asked me to take a picture of one, and they are few and far between.

Across the street from the mansion, there was an enormous slice of spruce. I would have loved to be alive to see a tree of this girth alive. I guess I will have to go see the redwoods someday.

It is sad that one of the entries on the sign is board feet. This tree was worth more than the 123, 922 board feet that was taken out of it.....

We went for lunch and headed over to Thousand Islands. This is the place where Aurora was hatched and lost her eye.

This was her nest.

I am surprised that the nest was still in the tree. We saw a lot of downed trees from the numerous wind storms we have had this summer. 

This one was making a tunnel across one of the trails. We went quite a ways and ended up at Old Ferry Road. It was an early portage on the Fox River, that was later used as a ferry point for freight.

The best tree of the day goes to the yep, yep, yep tree. (If you have ever watched the Muppets, you will get it!)

Our next stop was Heckrodt. The IWRC was holding a training conference, and we thought we would stop and check it out. The kids got to climb into an eagle nest replica.

After we all cleaned up and loaded the gear, we headed to Fratello's. I had a great dinner of Chicken and Spinach Gnocchi with a nice cream sauce. It was great to sit and relax after a busy weekend.