It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere

It's high tide – or high time – I share my inaugural Parrothead experience! Finally going through pictures and reliving the experience that is a Jimmy Buffett concert.

The morning of July 20 dawned hot and humid with 82 degrees at our house at 9 a.m. It's not wonder the big, bad storms blew through that day. In fact, we were watching dark clouds in our rearview mirror most of our way down to Alpine Valley. Later we learned off all the storm damage in the Rapids area and even our neighborhood, but were assured our house and trees were OK. So we stayed in Margaritaville.

 

We met up with our veteran crew – friends Kyler and Julie and their pretty much annual Parrothead gang – outside of Alpine Valley so we could caravan in together. There's a system to everything and they knew what they were doing!

As you can see, you gotta park certain ways so you can set up you canopies – quite useful in hot sun and, in our case later that afternoon, driving rain.

Here's our crew. Parking side by each we managed to have 6 cars (3 rows) so we (they) could set up the canopies, tables and grills. It's a system, like I said.

No lack of food or beverage, that's for sure. Though the sweet stuff got soaked later!

Here's Kyler and Jim, who worked together a dozen years at the publishing house in Iola.
 

And a rare photo while the sun was shining. 

Because yes, this was the view before the clouds broke. 

All these smart people with tents! 

After the rain, we walked around to catch some of the Parrothead Party surrounding us. Fins to the left, fins to the right!

So many parrots.

Whatever they were doing with stuff inside ice, they told us they couldn't use a chainsaw this year. Uhm, probably good unless you can find a sober operator.

These people even brought in their own beach sand! It's serious business.

Me: Look at the lighthouse! Jim: No, you can't have one.

Kyler's wife Julie and I befriending a shark! We have a unique fin-ship. Ha.

How much stuff can they fit in their cargo shorts and can they find it?

Time for the concert. Follow the crowd of interesting outfits.

We had general admission seats on the lawn – on the hill. My first time ever to Alpine Valley. It's quite a hill. You can see behind us that we positioned ourselves sort of center stage. But far away.

A panoramic of the hill.

And here's our gang!

And goofy-ness.

And well-behaved. Momentarily.

Concert-time temperature. Wow.

See, we could catch glimpses of Jimmy on stage.

But for the most part, watched on the screens.

There was entertainment in the crowd, too. Lots of beach balls boppin' around and later, these light-up fins making their way through the crowd.

And the crowd... always standing. Always singing. Always having fun.

It was a great time. The only downers were getting stuck in the mud trying to get out of the parking lot. And they having that process of leaving take some 2 hours.

We were so exhausted by then that rather than get home at 4 a.m., we found a cheap hotel in Madison and crashed for a few hours. Woke up somewhat refreshed... craving Cheeseburgers in Paradise.

Windy City

Since we were down at Jimmy Buffett at Alpine Valley yesterday (I'll get to that another day), we missed the big, huge, gigantic wind storm that blew through the Rapids area. Actually, through most of central Wisconsin.

Despite trees on houses, campers, and power lines in our neighborhood, our home and yard were spared and we didn't lose power. Praise the Lord. But many are still without power due to dozens of trees still on lines! It looks like a war zone. And that's after a day of cleanup while were wasting away in Margaritaville.

For my out-of-town folks, here's a glimpse of the damage from my car window.

This is actually the "back yard" of our museum, where I was planning to do a senior photo shoot today. We did some alternate locations for now and will get back here when cleanup is done sometime the next week or so. Yikes.

All too common sight – tree limbs on power lines. Scary stuff.

All area parks took a hit. This one is south of Rapids in Nekoosa.

About those trees on power lines.

Power crews to the rescue. With thousands of residents without power since Saturday morning (including some of our neighbors and my in-laws in town), there are dozens of crews from around Wisconsin helping us recover and restore our power. That's awesome, isn't it?

Our ''expressway" in town looks like the trees on both sides fell like dominoes. And not getting snapped off. Just uprooted and falling over.

No power meant treating every intersection like a four-way stop – no matter how many lanes!

Just about every street looks like this today. All kinds of brush and branches piled up at the curb.

Might be hard to tell through the barbecue smoke drifting through, but this is quite a massive tree that fell onto this mobile home across from Robinson Park.

I was almost brought to tears seeing Robinson Park, which lost some of its 100+ year-old trees during a wind storm some 10 years ago or so. Now dozens more were lost again!

Everywhere I turned, there were trees down!

 

Well, this one wasn't quite down, but now what? It might be too dangerous to leave as is.

Now you might get a better sense how tall those trees are.

Our Assumption High School softball team plays here. There is fence damage down the first-base line.

There's a second, smaller field that our middle school softball team plays at. Notice the tree on the concession stand building?

For the most part, it looks like roof damage between the concession and storage areas. Hopefully too too tough to fix.

This tree seemed to split three ways and two of them hit the home team dugout and fence!

Isn't that crazy?

 
We also had a number of trees fall against the viaduct bridge by the park. I guess on the other side, where there were on the road, they had to get chainsawed up on Saturday so traffic could go through.

The winds – which I haven't found the exact mph yet – were strong enough to uproot a tree from the blacktop even!

There was a long line at the compost site or whatever it's called. They had it open today so people could bring in their piles of brush and branches only. Quite a line!

And finally, the weird happening that makes me wonder if this was a twister...

Our neighbors a few houses down lost this big tree that appeared to have been twisted like a corkscrew, lifted up and laid down. Seriously, there's just a hole under it! No stump. No ground and lifted! Everything about this storm was strange.

Hope you survived OK – wherever you are – and have electrical power soon. You don't want to miss out on any good blogs or other good stuff on the Internet!