Powers Lake highlights

It’s been a while since my last posting.  I can’t say I’ve been busy, exactly, but there have been a lot of people coming and going from Powers Lake. First, my parents, brother, sister, and their families came for the weekend of the 14^th , and everyone from my Mom’s side of the family came for the annual family picnic. Then Brian’s parents visited for four days, followed by a full house of friends from Kansas City, Maryland, and Mississippi.

I’ll just give you a few highlights:

My cousin’s daughter Lauren, who is four, got smacked in the head with a baseball bat during the family picnic. This is not a highlight in itself. It was actually a little traumatic for everyone. But she rebounded like a champ, a champ with a big purple lump on her forehead. It made me wonder what sort of sporting equipment German kids get whacked with – soccer balls? Handballs? Sausages?  We took over the public beach that afternoon and got a lot of mileage out of some squirt guns and plastic fishing nets.

My nephews are now one whole year bigger than when I last saw them. I wonder what they think of Brian and me in their little boy heads. They’ve never seen us very often but hear about us sometimes and know we somehow fit in to the family… and then they go blast each other with squirt guns and don’t think about it any more. I also got to meet my new baby niece Phoebe, who is all cheeks and chins and sugar and spice.

Some of Brian’s best and oldest friends came up for a long weekend with their families and we rented a pontoon boat for the day. Powers Lake is not huge, and it’s pretty shallow, but it was a great day to be out on the rock bar. The rock bar is a shoal in the middle of the lake which is about shin deep. Pretending to be real boat people, we dropped anchor, got out our coozys and our flotation devices, and hung around the rock bar in the sun most of the afternoon.

There is a little bar near the house called the Annex. You may remember it from my post about eating fried food for lunch during our first week at the lake. Every year the Annex hosts a pig roast. I’d never been in town for the pig roast before, but it fulfilled all of my dreams of Americana: meat, cowboy hats, Miller beer, macaroni salad, live music, and cheese curds.

Now we are on the way to Minneapolis. Since we are car-less while in the US, we are riding the Megabus. Megabus is nothing like German transportation. It rolled in to the Milwaukee stop an hour late, there were no soft pretzels to buy in the station, and I am now overhearing all sorts of passengers having all sorts of conversations and getting to know each other. I have yet to witness a lot of Germans chatting with strangers on the bus or the train, or anywhere really. But Americans like to talk to most everyone. Megabus does is not the classiest way to travel, but it is the cheapest.  The passengers are not as cultured and articulate as you might expect. Brian and I are the only ones reading books on the bus. But just as we watch overweight poor people eat Taco Bell, we must remember that we are here because a rental car was too expensive, and that we are currently snacking on pizza flavored Combos. So maybe we should slurp our fountain drinks, strike up a conversation with someone across the aisle, and quit complaining.