After being away from home for eight days we came home for one night and left again the next day. This time Scott had a job in Madison.  Before my job at a hotel on the outskirts of Madison, I thought we could have breakfast as a family. We found this breakfast spot near our hotel called the Jet Room . You get to watch the airplanes take off and land. The kids got little airplanes too.  We only saw private planes, but it still was fun.  Somehow there's no pictures of the food, but the breakfast was quite good. While Scott worked, the kids and I went to the Madison Children's Museum. I had been wanting to take them to a children's museum for so long so it was fun to try out this one. I was pleasantly surprised to see a whole exhibit dedicated to Frank Lloyd Wright.  A side note. Many of the great architects of modernist movements started by playing with f roebel blocks . They were the heart of early kindergarten education. I loved all the details of course.  Then...

Day 6 This day would see us exploring the south shore of the Upper Peninsula, which is oddly the North Shore of Lake Michigan. We luckily had a break in the rain when we headed to Fayette Historic State Park . We were surprised to see an almost empty parking lot when we arrived. This was one of our favorite stops 10 years back. Theo found something stinky in the old furnaces.

 Before heading out on our trip we let the kids open their Christmas gifts from us. A knitted sweater for Theo and a kitty dress for Meadow (I fixed the straps for her) both made by me. I wanna a sweater. Scott got them new compact sleeping bags. We all got smaller sleeping bags this year and we'll now have a lot more room in our car. This year we had talked about hosting my family at the cottage. Then meeting up in Milwaukee, then meeting in Chicago. But in the end we made stops in Chicago and Lowell this Christmas. We left on a Sunday which was nice to have a few days to prepare. On the way down to Chicago we stopped at our favorite roadside restaurant, Foster Cheese Haus. We had plans to break up our drives so we didn't have to rush like we normally do. We had made it just before the cheese haus was set to close for the winter. Just not enough folks stop here in winter and snowmobile season is becoming shorter and shorter this far so...