Excellent day of touristing
Originally published at Vylar Kaftan. You can comment here or there.
After my adventures getting to Madison, I was thrilled to keep my original plans of local touring. Anaea Lay picked us up, and we enjoyed brunch with apple mimosas at La Brioche. Then we went to the Forevertron and the Circus Museum, both in Baraboo.
The Forevertron is the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world. It was way cooler than I expected and the pics don’t do it justice. It looked like a giant playground set for kids who’d had their tetanus shots. There was a metal bird orchestra and some giant cherries which needed a Pac-Man. Lots of the sculptures have windchimes, which jangled when the wind blew. There wasn’t much signage for this place, so it felt like a big secret. We all thought it was awesome.
After that, the Circus Museum was pretty close by, and it was equally but differently cool. It was a lot bigger than I expected. In three hours, we saw about half of the place. They had normal museum exhibits about circus history, and they also had old circus wagons-some of them very old. There was a collection of costumes that you could actually touch, and a model train of all the circus cars. My favorite part was the Theatre of Illusion; the magician was very good and his jokes were hilarious. He liked to pretend he was screwing tricks up a lot (of course he wasn’t). We also saw a Big Top show, and the trained Pekinese dogs were cute. The contortionist passed his body through an unstrung tennis racket, which I might have been able to do when I was less than four feet tall.
We ended by picking up Mike Underwood and going for South American food at El Rincon Tico. Oh my god, it was _fabulous_, and I can forgive the slow service and too-hot dining room, because that is the best meal I’ve had in ages. I had a caipirinha, a bean empanada, the vegetarian curry, and Holy Crap Fried Plantains with some sort of caramel sauce. Okay, they weren’t officially called Holy Crap, but I hereby dub them so.
I decided that all the good things from yesterday drained into today, and that was why yesterday sucked so much.
Looking forward to WisCon!