Northern Road Trip, Day 2: Quality time near Madison's two lakes.

(backdated according to my usual unique custom)

I've already taken (yet another) look at the impossibly huge Saturday morning farmers market in Madison, Wisconsin. Somehow it thrives based entirely on its own merits, sans "improvements" that serve mostly as window dressing for the organizers. Read about it here:

Multitudinous farmers market. Zero permanent infrastructure.

There's a noticeable festive ripple effect from the market, filling nearby parking garages (people in New Albany just don't like them -- it an aesthetic suburbanite anti-thing), and spilling merrily down State Street, which angles from the capital square toward the University of Wisconsin campus and offers shops and cafes aplenty ... and street corner yoga.

After a couple hours and the ghastly sum of maybe $3 to park in one of those horrible garages, we drove through campus to Picnic Point at Lake Mendota, the larger of two bodies of water on each side of the capital isthmus.

Yes, we actually picnicked there.

Then it was often to what has become my favorite of Madison's breweries, Vintage Brewing Company, for a couple of rounds while Diana shopped nearby.

Sated, it was time for a short drive through the center and a stroll through the Olbrich Park Botanical Gardens, facing Lake Monona.

It's a Thai shrine at the Botanical Garden, sans pad thai.

Botanically exhausted, we set up camp by the shore of Lake Monona and enjoyed the day's second picnic. It may have included two discretely dispensed gin and tonics, and was so relaxing that I promptly fell asleep.

Relaxation.

Some times one must depart from Truck Through City to find some.