Saturday on the rails

This morning I went in to volunteer at the gift store at the Riverside & Great Northern Railway. I will begin working there over the Memorial Day weekend, but I am a new member and am volunteering some hours to help them out and to familiarize myself with the way things are done. Not much to learn today -- because it was a cold and windy morning, there were few visitors. At one point while I was outside explaining the hours and fees to a nice Indian woman (India-Indian, not Native American), there were snowflakes falling.

There had been forecasts of rain and snow showers this morning, but not much happened at all beyond that handful of flakes. I will be back there tomorrow, but the weather does not look much more promising, so there probably won't be much more business. This is a family and kid-oriented operation, and bad weather does not encourage people to take their kids for a ride in open train cars.

I mentioned that yesterday a tornado touched down in Wyocena, south of here. This is a picture of a guy's RV that had been flipped onto the roof of his house. Looks like a flatbed trailer here. The recreational part of the vehicle was blown away, I guess.

On the brighter side, Life Books just declared the Dells one of the top vacation spots in the world. To quote Tom's blog,

The Events [our local newspaper] reports that Life Books has just published "Dream Destinations: 100 of the World's Best Vacations", a "stunning, oversized hardcover book" which lists Wisconsin Dells among the 100 dream vacation spots in the world.

In the opinion of the editors, anyway, Wisconsin Dells is a vacation spot on the order of London, Paris, the Bosporus, Orlando, the Denali, Polynesia, Crete and 90-plus other wonders of the world.

Now I like it here, but I told Tom that if this is one of the 100 top places in the world, the world must be a whole lot less interesting than I thought.

I must admit, though, that one of the folks at the Railway today was another India-Indian who had brought his family to ride the train. They are from California now, but he told me that he was very impressed with the beauty of the Dells. Considering how blustery and cold it was, and that things are still mostly brown and gray, that says a lot. (I must also admit that he said this was probably going to the last time they came to Wisconsin. Too far to drive -- with gasoline over $3.50 a gallon.)

I hear lots of worried talk in this tourist-industry town about how fuel prices are going to affect things around here this summer. It may just mean that more Wisconsin families come, unable to travel too far to vacation elsewhere. Of course, our huge tourist population is from Illinois, and they may have to stay closer to home, too. We did have a nice young Polish couple in the store this morning. Because so many eastern European kids work here in the summers, they go home and talk about the Dells, so we get a lot of eastern Europeans through. Some are probably visiting family, of course. The local parish has a regular Mass in Polish now, as well as one in Spanish.

The Spanish I can handle, but Polish is beyond me.

Na razie!