A day along the Mississippi...

We don't really watch TV...we have gone months without even turning one on.  On a rare evening, I think we were somewhere in Indiana, I let the kids surf the channels for a while before bedtime.  They love animal and nature type shows, so of course they landed on Animal Planet.  There was a show on called "American River Renegades", we didn't catch the whole thing, but apparently enough.  You see, just after we crossed the Mississippi River and started to drive through Prairie du Chien, the kids all started pointing out the windows and chattering about this shop we were about to pass.  It was the Valley Fish & Cheese and they instantly recognized it from the show! Ha! 

How funny is that???...

It was too late that day to stop, but we made sure to pay them a visit before leaving town...

We love having picnics, so we decided to check out the store and get our lunch fixings there one day.  Oh boy.  You want turtle jerkey?  They got it.  Gator meat?  Got that, too.  Pretty much all the creatures that swim, they had some.  My boys sampled the turtle, I did not (noooo thank you).

The store and the father/daughter duo running it were great :).  Same folks from the show and just as nice as could be.  We bought a handful of Indian pottery pieces that Mike had found at various times along the river.  ***When I was a little girl, we lived near the Apalachicola River in Florida...many, many times we would walk along the banks and collect the ancient pottery pieces.  Just like the ones he had :), great memories <3*** 

Picnic in hand, we headed to St. Feriole Island...

hickory smoked salmon spread from Valley Fish & Cheese...the BEST

our view while we picnicked...

This island was the original site of the town, it's recorded history dates back to the 1600's.  There are mounds that tell of native American inhabitants even earlier than that...

The next place the kids insisted we go was on the Iowa side of the river.  A place called Pikes Peak State Park.  The only Pikes Peak we were familiar with was the mountain in Colorado.  We lived right next to it for a year, in a little town just above Woodland Park, so the kids were very interested to see this other place by the same name :)...

A bluff instead of a mountain, a different kind of beautiful...

hey kids...look right here, right into the sun, now "smile!"...oops...sorry, kids!

The view was gorgeous, but the bugs were not.  There were swarms of some kind of annoying bugs that cut our visit short and sent us high-tailing it back to the car...

all those specks...BUGS!  EVERYWHERE!

Before crossing back over to Wisconsin, we decided to check out the town of Marquette, Iowa.  There was a little antique shop that caught my eye and I convinced the kids to go in with me.  Three stories and a basement later, and I was all shopped out for the day.  Don't feel sorry for the kids, their turn came later...they spent the rest of the evening eating pizza and going bananas at the waterpark while I supervised and did laundry ;p