Madison Trip

Christy usually comes back to the Twin Cities on the weekends and comes to visit me, but this time I felt like I had a little more time on my hands with my cohort graduated, and decided to make the trip to visit her in Madison. It’s about a 4 hour drive, but not too bad at all. I left late Saturday morning and arrived just before 2PM. We had a great time hanging out that evening and just catching up on things. It’s been a while since we got together without an agenda or time window looming. We headed out for dinner at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner, then spent more time just hanging out and playing with her cats - Whim & Willow.

Sunday we had breakfast at Lazy Jane’s Cafe, where I had an awesome lemon scone and Christy had an amazingly fluffy looking waffle. Then we spent the afternoon at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens. The gardens were amazingly beautiful and relaxing. If I lived near there, I think I’d be there all the time!

There were so many different kinds of trees, and shrubs and flowers!

This one I think was an ornamental garlic or onion…

The were common flowers like snapdragons and violets, but they hardly felt common…

And there were more unusual plants too! Like this one called a ballgown, which I think looks more like a lantern.

We saw some wildlife too. We saw bunnies, chipmunks, so many birds, turtles, and even some frogs well hidden in a pond. We only started to look close enough to find the frogs after we heard some kids competing to see who could find more.