Troubles with the Wisconsin Trip

How nice to spend a leisurely morning at home with no agenda. Ahhhhhh.

My family's trip to northern Wisconsin ran into a little difficulty. After getting the house picked up and everything packed for the trip (including instructions for someone taking care of the lightning family zoo while we would be gone), we headed out at 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning. Although I was to be the initial driver, my wife decided to get behind the wheel for the start of the trip. I happily snoozed .

About one hour into the trip, we began to hit nasty weather. I had been checking weather.com for several days to track the big winter storm that was still to the west of us. It appeared that Saturday would be a decent day to travel. However, my wife was horrified to see between 20 and 30 cars that had run off the interstate. We went further and then ran into some heavy snow. A call to my sister-in-law seemed to indicate that we would have only about one hour of good travel the rest of the trip. Therefore, after driving about 1/3 of the way (160 miles), we ate lunch, turned around and came back home. We had several inches of snow at home on Saturday through Sunday morning, so it looks like we made a good decision. The combination of ice, water, wind, and then snow makes midwest driving a challenge sometimes in winter.

Funny thing -- a majority of the vehicles that were in ditches were trucks or SUV's. Looks like the drivers overestimated how their vehicles would perform in the adverse weather. While we were trudging through at 50-60 mph, some of these idiots were passing us like we were standing still. Enjoy your wait in line for the towtruck!

Poker No Goot

I must have somehow offended the poker gods. I have been getting my butt kicked in every way imaginable -- running K-K into A-A, running Q-Q into A-A, running A-A into a flopped set, losing when a lucky two-outer hits after all the money has gone in ... Online poker has not been my friend since I returned from Las Vegas.

I was looking forward to playing some live poker at the St. Croix Casino in northern Wisconsin. I may have to hope the roads are okay to make a little jaunt to Par-A-Dice Casino in East Peoria instead.