Tag Archives: Wisconsin
2 years ago!
2009 in Pictures – March
2009 in Pictures – February
2009 in Pictures – January
Its not just Maple that makes Fall pretty!
The morning started cloudy outside, and very sleepy inside!!! Waking up around 8 and still being in bed when its almost 12 is an amazing experience! To be specific, I have not been sleeping on the bed at all… Have been camping on the floor after the terrible muscle pull last Friday, and now I do not feel like going back to sleeping on the bed!!!
Anyway, had seen a few leaves yesterday while walking back from the office and was determined to go back and take pictures of them irrespective of how the weather was going to behave! but to my luck, it behaved very very well! and what you see below is the result of a short walk around the neighborhood!
Its not just the maple leaves, but almost every single tree starts turning into beautiful bold pastel red, yellow and browns… A sight to see and remember! the Camera, if catches half of it, is doing just the introduction!!!
Enjoy the photographs below and do not forget to click the link at the end for a small slideshow of the Fall-Winter Collection from flickr!
And like I said before… here is the link. I would recommend press F11(Full Screen) as soon as you click the link for a better view.
Jungle mein mangal!
Our challenges were divided into jungle challenges and maha jungle challenges with a different point system… my team started with 3 points less than the other team because we had answered some quiz questions incorrectly…
Some of the games that we participated in were
1. Jungle Fashion show…
oh… my team’s name was Mattar Paneer with Miller Lite and our slogan was
Khao Piyo Mast Jiyo
Dhoom Machao Jeet ke Jao
and back to the games now..
2. Getting water from the wild
3. Collecting 3 live animals
4. Karela Eating
5. Mushrooms eating
6. Banana eating (with the peel)
7. Shrimps eating
8. Raw Eggs (breaking and having them)
And then a maha jungle challenge… my team was supposed to make a Ravan, and the other team was to put up a 10 seater tent! What you see below is the Ravan that we made!
There were loads of ball games as well which we enjoyed thoroughly… I also managed to sneak out for a small walk and some photography during a break!
And we also had a huge bonfire! The sky was absolutely clear that night and it was full of stars! The only time I have seen a better sky was when we had camped at Pangong Tso in Ladakh!
We slept around 2 am and got up early too! I had Gaurav’s phone with me, and I set an alarm for 8 am and woke up when the phone rang as well! I did wake some of the other guys up in my room asking them to come for a walk outside!
About hour an hour later I realized that I had woken up because of the 6 am alarm on Gaurav’s phone and not the 8 am one that I had set! 😛
The next day was a light one in terms of games, but we did play a few… including one where we had finish 30 golgappas! I participated in that one, and WON 😀
The breakfast was some lovely Poha and Chai …
Overall, this was one of the very few trips with such a large group that I have been in, and needless to say, I enjoyed it thoroughly!!!! One of the important things being, that team won, even though we started with 3 points less 🙂 It was the last game which turned out to be a deciding game as well! thrilling competition!
And all of us heading back to our homes happily 🙂
Will write about the other two trips soon…
1. The 3 day weekend in Canada
2. The 1600 mile roadtrip
The Dutch Village, a few Indians went to, in America
1. This is a very very very long post (45+ photographs, loads of text) so have a good amount of time on hand when you start reading it
2. This is dedicated to two very important parts of my life… Bindiya and Tushar who started new chapters in their lives in April and May respectively
3. This trip was a celebration of the “sincerely hoped for, unexpected” success of 30on30 initiative… and to share the joy, I would do a random draw of lots of all the people who comment on this post and will send them a print (which they can select from this post) if they are in India or US. If the comments are too less for a decent lot, I would randomly add some random comments from friends and include them !
Now that the conditions are laid out well, lets start….
So it was finalized that I am going to Holland to see the Tulips… Gaurav agreed, Deepali agreed, Pritam, Lakhan, Golu, Sapna agreed, and Jyoti agreed ( she was visiting me that week on her way from the West Coast of the Amreeka to the East Coast of Amreeka)
They left from Minneapolis early evening and I left Milwaukee around 1830 hrs… it was a long drive ahead and I was so looking forward to it… a fantastic car good music system and a nice weather was all that I could ask for… and I had some Samosa’s and Kachauri’s with me for the drive too 🙂 what fun !!!!
As expected driving was a breeze through without any issues at all…Reached the Super 8 Motel around midnight and Pritam and the gang reached soon after ! We did not spend much time talking then, and called it a day with a promise to leave the motel by 0930 hrs the next morning !
Pritam was driving a JEEP and there was no way I would have let anyone else drive that now that I was around… He knew that, and asked Sunil to handover the keys to me before I created any fuss ! He like a gentleman took the navigator seat and Pritam, Jyoti and Golu happily acquired the passenger seats !!! Just about 20 minutes away was our first destination of the day…
The Veldheer’s Tulip Garden….
I would be lying if I tell you that I was very excited to see what I saw… My bad! I was expecting miles of tulips of various colors and variety, but this turned out to be a relatively smaller than what I had painted in my head… It was not entirely my mistake actually, it was the advertising that got the better of me here ! But nevertheless it was a sight to see… I had never seen so many tulips together, so in a way this was a happy moment !
Enjoy the pictures below for a while, before getting back to reading more 🙂
Just before getting out of the Tulips Garden, we decided to take a few pictures of each other 🙂
There was a small factory inside the shop itself where the shoes were being made(below)…
Seen below is the 1970 Dodge truck we went around for a drive in….
I really wanted to see the sun set, and really wanted to see it… so we waited… it was not the most comfortable evening as it was pretty chilly, but my dear friends decided to hang around till sunset and then move back….
Now was time to go back to the Motel and call it a day… Jyoti had left something at Papa Romano’s in the afternoon so we decided to go back and see we could find it there… We could not and the guys decided to get themselves the infamous Smirnoff Vodka Mojito (will write about why its infamous separately) While Pritam, Golu and Jyoti were inside the Wine Shop, me and Sunil discussed the dinner options and realized that Indian Food was the best option… now at 2130 hrs, it was not going to be an easy task to first find an Indian Restaurant and that too an open one !!! but we tried… the GPS ( called Billo Rani by Pritam) helped and after about 5 unsuccessful attempts we found an Indian Restaurant called Bombay Cuisine in Grand Rapids about 20 miles away…
So after this loooooooooooooong touristy day and a heavy Indian dinner, we called it a day around midnight !!!!
It was a nice place to just sit and chat as well… I did not care much for the wines, and came out to just sit in the field and take pictures, while Pritam, Golu, and Jyoti were enjoying the wine tasting experience….
Sunil also decided to come out and relax for a while before he started the long drive back to Minneapolis…
The pit-stop was at Fenneville somewhere between somewhere, where we enjoyed some Pizzas at a Pizza hut before saying the final good byes to each other, promising to meet again soon !!! Post that, Sunil drove a bit faster towards their destination and I enjoyed the music and the amazingly smooth Nissan Altima to Milwaukee….
All in all, this trip ended up with me having a nice big smile on my face, exactly like the road-map between Milwaukee and Holland 🙂
I am already looking forward to my next trip !!! Are you?
Oh and congratulations for reaching the end of this post 😛
PickNick
Went to a picnic last weekend with a friend and his wife…
Looking at the number of leaves all around, I can only image how pretty this place would have been in Fall !!! And I am sure its going to look very very beautiful when there is snow all around !!! I am waiting for a decent snow fall to go there again !
Enjoy the pictures !
The US that I would like to remember….
The planning for the camping and the drive had started a couple of days back, with me trying to find out where to rent the tents from and the car from… I booked and canceled and booked and canceled the car booking a number of times, before we finalized the Enterprise Rentals for a compact car…
Pritam had already made the bookings for the camping site and the rafting and this was going to be an exciting weekend for sure… for two reasons, 1 that I was going to drive and second I was going to a place that I had never been to before, oh and 3 because I was camping which I had never done, and 4 because I would not have accompalished the not so common Rafting in two continents tag 😛 (Aro, Tushar, Subbu, Deepu… guys are you jealous 😀)
The initial plan was that these guys would pick me up from my apartment saturday morning but we figured that its going to waste time so I packed my bags and went along on friday itself to Pritam’s place… we had a list of things to do and the one on the top of the list was to get the rental car… The girl at enterprise happily upgraded us to a larger car and gave us a weekend deal which basically saved us atleast $40 per day for the 3 days we were renting the car for…
We were just sitting when one of the group said that we should leave friday night itself, there was no reason to wait till morning to drive to Wisconsin… The idea sounded better than trying to wake up at 4 in the morning… so i quickly went to bed (This was around 7 that we decided this and I had 3-4 hours to catch a nap)… Pritam woke me up at 11 and we were ready to move by 0100 hrs…
Next I know is that we drove and we drove and drove… The guy at the camp said that we should throw our GPS out of the window because its not going to take us to the camp, rather might just make us loose our way 😀 however I had the google map for the nearest town and then a smaller map for the way from Lakewood to the Kosir’s camp site next to river Peshtigo… so partly the map helped and the rest we managed with the GPS… also did manage to sleep for a couple of hours when Pritam took over the driving bit from me…
These are when we took a photography break on the Highway 32… the light was great and the weather wonderful… and we could not resist stopping for a while and just admiring the country side… The gentleman in the picture below came out of his barn and gave us company for a while and talked about the town etc… It was not very common for him to find strangers parked near his place and roaming around… and that too Indians 😀
We reached lakewood without getting much lost, but had to call the camp to find some directions to the site… was not too tough and we were at the camp in another 45 minutes…
Now came the challenge… none of us had ever put up a tent before and the instructions did not seem to be enough for the entire thing to be building up from that bag… we still tried and after a hardship of about 30 minutes and misunderstanding the instructions, we were able to put the tent up exactly the way it was supposed to be… the second tent took less time and the third one was done up in 10 minutes flat !!! Meanwhile the ipod and the speakers were also set up and soft hindi music had started playing in our camp site…
Mornings are time for breakfast, and because we had a lot of bread and strawberry jam and haldiram namkeens and biscuits… the first meal at the camp was not a problem at all… infact it was nice eating in the (almost) wild like that… None of us except one had mobile signals on their cell and it was a good feeling to be honest 🙂
When we finally decided to move away from the camp and explore the area, we realised that there was an annual parade going on…. a small one but a nice one where a lot of people from the town participated… I think it had to do something with the fire department of the county as a lot of fire engines were a part of it….
It had some things that can cause fire too, as you see in the picture below 🙂
We decided to turn back and explore the place on foot before we take the cars out and go to the waterfall that we were supposed to go to… and below is what I clicked on the small 45 minute walk around the camp….
We finally managed to get out of the camp, also managed to get lost and find our way back towards the camp and then towards the waterfall that we were trying to go to…
But this was not a waterfall but a small park with some bridges on the river… I was happy to be there, took my camera out and went shooting again, while the rest of the gang was happy exploring the place in the other direction too…
And when there is water and there are boys, it does not take much to get in and have a ball !!! so there were we enjoying the warm water stream and being the kids we always miss in ourselves….
We were then told that we were not too far away from the waterfall either, and we decided that the second part of the fun was going to be at the waterfall… so the guys just hopped on in the cars… in watever form they were and we drove to the waterfall some 5 miles away 🙂
While the rest of the gang jumped into the water rightaway to have their second half of taking a fun bath, i decided to call it quits and just walked around taking some pictures…. check out the place like I did below 🙂
We left the Goodman park in about an hours time and I was very very happy to see this part of the US… typically one would associate US with tall buildings and busy downtowns and here we were in the middle of nowhere, with our phones not working and cars being seen at the rate of 1 every 30-45 minutes….
Back at the camp in the evening, we did not have much to do so we decided to just walk around the camp… there were 26 camp sites in the camp and most of them were occupied…. small tents, big tents, family tents, campers and jeeps, everything was there….
The bus that Kosir’s use to ferry rafters in the Peshtigo river camp…
We were just hanging out at our camping site not doing anything… the picture below is our camp site (#10)… you can see our 3 tents and the two cars parked…
No camping is complete without a campfire and we had made all arrangements for it too… got some extra firewood to ensure that the fire stays till we manage to stay awake… I was pretty tired from my day so I decided to call it a day around 2200 and the rest of the guys I guess were awake till midnight before they decided to sleep off too…
I woke up at 0400 hrs to pee, and when I got out of my sleeping bag ( man it was tough or tough to get out of it in pitch dark) and the tent I saw one of the most spectacular sights ever… Second to Pangong Tso I must say… the sky was studded with stars and no two stars were more than 1 mm away from each other… absolutely brightly lit sky this was… I forgot to pee too 😀 and kept looking at it for a while before I realised that nature was calling for something else other than just stars as well 🙂
We all woke up around 0900 hrs in the morning and lazyly just sat around not doing anything… we had to read the rafting campsite around 1400 hrs and had a lot of time on hand so there was no hurry of any sort…
These two girls in the picture below were roaming all around the camp on their miniature bike… very cute girls they were…
I decided to pick up my lenses and take pictures around the camp again… here is what I clicked…
And then there was time to take pictures of the gang I was travelling with… so here we go 🙂
We finally drove out around 12 and reached the other site in abot 45 minutes… did not have much to do except just hang around the laaaaaaaaaaaaarge open spaces and I could not think of anything but to take out my camera and take more pictures…
We went out for rafting around 1430 hrs and well.. what can I say except that I love Rishikesh and I love the Ganges… there was just one rapid ( grade IV) and we did that twice… thats it !!! lets just forget it !!! ( so guys, don’t be jealous ! this was more of a water park ride that I did )
Suman dislocated his shoulder while he was being pulled up on the raft… now this was some stupid thing which I must mention here… the guys were pulled up with their hands, which increased the probability of an injury for obvious reasons… our guides in Rishikesh always say that pull a guy up holding the life jacket and not anything else…
The instructor arranged for Suman to be taken to the hospital where he was taken care of just fine… the picture below is in the hospital parking lot…
And this is Suman, who looks more treated than he was actually… not sure why all these wires were fixed to him…. he slept most of his way back home though… I drove half the distance and then Pritam took over….
Got back only by 0300 hrs and managed to sleep for 4 hours before we returned the car, and then the tents and reached office… All in all a wonderful weekend… something that I would like to remember for a long time 🙂
God bless !!!