Valentine's Day, that would be yesterday we decided to take a trip to town.  It was snowing but not too bad as it's 11+ miles to town, one way.

Home sweet home.

I hope you enjoyed the trip to town.

A couple of weeks ago we got a call from one of our Texas daughters saying that she will be in Minneapolis for the weekend and would we want to meet for lunch, of course we would.  So, we took a road trip up to Red Wing Minnesota.

As always, I grabbed some knitting.  I will confess, I have more than one knitting project going on at the same time :)

Heading through the hills the fog was in the valleys.  It made for some pretty shots.

We of course had to stop into the Red Wing Shoe Museum.  Mr used to buy Red Wing boots when he worked construction.

Beautiful days we are having, but I know the colder weather is just around the corner.  The color change hasn't been that great, only seeing a few trees here and there that are really colorful.  How about you all, are the trees changing color in your area?

Who remembers those one-room school houses?  I'm too young to have been lucky enough to attend one, but here in Wisconsin they are being restored for people like me to go and visit.  The poor grand-kids had to pose with the hot sun shining in their eyes, just so their grandma could take a photo, such good sports they were.

This seems to be the end of my photo taking from Labor day weekend.  I still need to post more photos from our trip west.  So much has been going on here.  I either have no photos to post or I have so many I can't keep up.

I had a very productive weekend and I will post about that later.  The days are nice and warm with the evening and night temps dropping into the 50's.  I'm so loving it.

I got the opportunity to spend some time down at Navy Pier in Chicago on Friday, Mr had to head down there to field measure a job he is doing and the building was a short walk from Navy Pier.  So with camera in hand I took a walk.  It was a cool but beautiful day down in the city.

Who remembers playing crack the whip?

Thinks he can pick off a duck.  We got to see a funny thing with a young eagle trying to get one of the ducks in the water.  Sorry that some of the shots aren't that clear, it went so fast I couldn't focus well.  It started off with the eagle flying by the duck in the second photo, then circling around and going in.

The duck was too fast for him.

He gave up and went to scope out more prey.

I'm thinking that the adult eagle sitting high in the tree was having a good laugh watching it all go down.  Probably thinking silly young'un.

Hope you enjoyed this series of photos, it really was a sight to see.

Have a wonderful day!

On New Years day Mr and I went snowshoeing, it was pretty cold outside but we dressed for it.  Trying to embrace the cold winter is what we are trying to do since we won't be heading south this winter.

I had not been out of the house for a few days, so yesterday we decided to take a trip to the Mississippi river.  Along the way we drove along side the Wisconsin river.  I just love this drive, there's a small town that we go through that I told Mr I wanted to stop and take some photos of.

I'm sure this kind of town can be found anywhere in the states. 

The short look down main street.

A small town somewhere between here and there. If you blink you went right through it.

Or you could say RTV trip (Rugged Terrain Vehicle).  Our neighbor invited us to go on an ATV trip starting from his farm that he hosts every year.  Depending on who you talked to there, we either went 14 miles or 18 miles in a 3 hour ride :)  There were 27 machines on the ride and we were 14th in line.

That's the back end of our RTV.

Off we go, there was a total of 27 machines.

The first stop was at our barn this year.

After the ride we all ate and visited.  It was a perfect way to end a wonderful day.

I look forward to doing this again.

Remember a few weeks back where we went on an road trip that took us into Iowa and Minnesota?  We left the hawks and headed on down the road and came upon this place.  These are Tundra Swans and they stop here on the river to rest while they travel to the place where they spend the winter months.

If you look close you can see a pair of eagles sitting together on the rivers bank in the photo below.

I got a total charge out of the ducks looking for food.

I overheard some people talking that there would be more swans coming to stop and rest here.  We had hoped to get back here, but it just didn't work out, I'm pretty sure they have already all come and gone.

On our way down the road we entered into Minnesota, another drive by shot that I almost missed.

Just past the Upper Mississippi River sign we saw some people stopped on the side of the road looking at something in the trees, so of course we stopped to have a look.  You could hardly see them in the trees, there were actually more hawks then the ones in the photo below, these were just the ones I could get good photos of.

I put on my zoom lens, but the trees were so thick that I had a hard time getting a focus on them.

There we go, this was the best I could get.  They didn't look the the Red Tailed Hawks that we get in our area.

All of a sudden they all moved over to anther bunch of trees down the road, so we followed them.  I loved this little bridge as we were going by.

Still not any good shots of the hawks, plus they seemed pretty nervous with all the cars stopping.

We took this ones que and took flight right on down the road.