Born to Run

Once a month, I get to spend alone time with one of my kids, usually an overnight. This month it's my turn with my daughter, and we'd been talking for weeks about how we'd spend the time. We finally settled on a trip to Devil's Lake, a state park about an hour from our house. We put our bikes on the back of the car, grabbed our beach gear, and off we went.

Like all the best adventures, it didn't work out at all like we planned. We never actually went to Devil's Lake. Driving into Baraboo, the town you go through right before arriving at the entrance to the park, we saw that something was going on. Streets were blocked off, booths were set up... we'd skipped our local farmer's market this morning so we could hit the road, but when we spied what we thought might be another market, we felt compelled to park and check it out. That was at 11am -- we finally drove away from that parking space at 5pm. What we thought was a market turned out to be "Old Fashioned Days." One of the highlights of Old Fashioned Days was a huge water fight (pictured above) using actual fire hoses to shoot at a keg that is suspended in the air. It was awesome! The woman next to us said they'd been doing this every year since the 60s, when she'd come to watch it as a little girl. We've decided to make it an annual trip ourselves.

But the best moment, we decided over dinner this evening, wasn't something we were able to photograph. Later in the afternoon, we'd unloaded our bikes and rode them toward the riverwalk, which one of the locals recommended as a nice place to ride. It was magical -- especially the part where we rode down off the riverwalk on a trail, right to the edge of the river, and climbed out over the river on the trunk and branches of a Weeping Willow tree. We fancied it as our river home -- and the leaves that hung down all around us as the curtains. We wondered if maybe we could live there, at least in the summertime.

Heading back to Madison, I turned on the radio to see what was playing, and it was none other than this song by the Boss -- a man I grew up loving (and whose arms -- and voice -- I still have a definite affinity). Although the song is not about anything as innocent as pretending to live in a tree over a river, it is about how amazingly free you can feel when you leave it all behind, even for a few hours...