charismatic megafauna since 1985

Back to the Beginning

Tess and I got back to her house in Newaygo around 11pm last night. We spent the weekend in Madison, WI with my cousin Matt who’s a super-senior at Wisconsin-Madison.

We got into Madison around dinner-time on Friday night after leaving Gaea and Jason in Minneapolis. We went out to get dinner at this nice little Nepalese place in downtown. After going back to his house for a bit, we all went out again to hang with a friend of Tess’ from Chile and her husband. We ended up getting a drink at a place called The Old Fashioned which didn’t look too old-fashioned, but did have $2 pints of some tasty local beer. After we said goodbye to the two of them, Matt, Tess and I wandered around downtown and ended up at some crowded college bar. Matt’s ex-girlfriend ran into us there (met us there?) and so mostly it was Tess and I chatting while they were off doing whatever.

On Saturday, Matt’s parents Patty and Fred showed up. They’d already been planning to come up to visit Matt for the 3-day weekend and it was a nice coincidence that we were there at the same time. We walked around the town for a little while, the three of them giving me and Tess a mini-tour of the campus. The campus itself is over 900 acres, so it would take a long time to tour the whole thing. After lunch Patty and Fred went off to check into their hotel and the three of us went back to Matt’s house. Matt went out to get coffee with a different ex-girlfriend, and Tess and I stayed in with one of Matt’s housemates Josh watching some college football.

We had dinner with Patty and Fred, then came back again to the house. After watching some more college football, we played a game that’s a staple at the house: the Walker, Texas Ranger drinking game. There’s a poster on the wall explaining the rules, but it’s basically self-explanatory. When things happen on screen (roundhouse kick, CN abruptly ending a conversation, fake sound effect, slow-motion scene, etc.) you drink. Neither episode we watched required a steep amount of drinking, but it was a lot of fun just to laugh at the old TV program. When that finished we caught the end of the 11-inning Red Sox loss and went to bed.

Yesterday the big event was the rugby match against someone. Tess nor I had ever seen a rugby match before so it was a really fun experience. It definitely lives up to its reputation as grown men (or women, as the case may be) beating the crap out of each other. It was a pretty close game, but Wisconsin pulled out the win 41-36. After that, we said goodbye to Patty, Fred and Matt and pushed through back to Newaygo.