Governor Doyle declares crisis over...

The Great Flood.

I interrupt this travellog in order to keep you all updated on current events. It's a generous service I provide here, I know.

So...there's some flooding going on. Maybe you've heard of it--water in places outside the bounds man has set for it.

There's also a little cottage in southern Wisconsin called "The Lake" on the shores of Lake Koshkonong--which, I've just learned, is actually NOT a lake but a bulge in a river...in which case the cottage may need to be renamed...and which is also more than I can say for my sister who just learned that there's actually a lake there. My grandpa used to live in this cottage so when I was young my family would spend most of our vacations visiting him. I won't bore you with nostalgic details of the things we would do there. Just know the cottage has been in the family for a while and now that my grandpa has passed away my dad owns it and has spent many weekends down there getting things ship-shape...just in time for...
Instead of wading through waist-deep water for 100 yards to get to the cottage my parents and aunt and uncle used a canoe. Yep, a tippy canoe. Then they lugged all the ruined furniture to higher ground. Aah...just like the flood of '59...or was it '58...no, no it was '59.

Mykonos

This is where the real party started--and I'm not being trite: Full Moon Party, Paradise Beach, 1:00 am. We may have arrived there 38 hours fashionably late but I can assure you we didn't miss out on any of the fun...ok, so maybe we missed some of the dancing...or, all of the dancing...but there was still plenty to see.

Mykonos marked the beginning of our island adventures with cobblestone streets, whitewashed buildings, colorful doorways, clear blue water, and feral kitties...lots and lots of roaming beady-eyed cats...and waitresses.

Our hotel was just off the beach. A beach aptly named Agios Stefanos. It was a typically whitewashed building with bright red doors and shutters. Despite the fact that we got bread and diluted orange juice for breakfast, the beds had petrified mattresses, and the shower curtain could have been cited for sexual harrassment...we loved it. I think because it was our first.
In order to give ourselves some recovery time we headed to a beach called Platy Gialos. There we made friends with Massager Boy--an actual title, not a nickname--and spent some time both seaside and poolside. Gretchen and I got in trouble for trying to investigate a church...we were kind of scaling a hill and she was about to climb the wall...so instead we snuck into a hotel pool. Later we bought dinner from a different hotel and earned some pool time just above the Meditteranean.
We spent the remainder of the day wandering around Mykonos Town and stumbled across 16th century windmills--you know, the kind you would expect midget archers to inhabit and shoot flaming arrows out of. Down the hill from there was an area called Little Venice where we ate dinner just off the beach...again, watched the sunset, took 50 pictures of an authentic Greek man and his paper mache bagpipe, encountered Petros the pelican--the Mykonos mascot, and had a Canadian kindly tell us his country is bigger than ours.
Not bad for a first day, I'd say.