The northern states seem to have only two seasons annually: winter and road construction. Ted and I hit a lot of road construction on our way from visiting Ted’s brother to seeing our grandson in Rockford, IL. As a result, we arrived about an hour later than we’d planned. It was fun to see Sky’s Star Wars-themed apartment. If there’s Star Wars merch, Sky (named Anakin Sky) probably has it. Ted took a picture of Sky and me. Check out the coffee table–and underneath the coffee table–and the helmet on the right. And this was just the beginning of the themed décor.
We had a nice visit with Sky and then went out for dinner together and visited some more. We arrived later than we’d expected, and stayed longer than we’d expected, so it’s all good. I love having independent adult grandchildren who stay in touch and welcome visits from Grandma and Grandpa.
After dinner with Sky, Ted and I headed for I-39 and home. At a rest stop, we saw this truck with a very long load. The big question: How does it turn corners? Surely it needs an escort vehicle.
When we arrived at home, the first thing we saw was a pretty “Welcome home” garden bouquet from Kari.
As I was putting away our “real” Wisconsin cheese, there were more welcome home items. We didn’t have to go to the grocery store first thing in the morning–we had hamburger for our hard rolls, bread and fruit for lunch, cookies for fun, and milk to go with them.
You know you did more right than wrong when you were raising your kids when they grow up to be as thoughtful as this. It was wonderful to spend time with some of our friends and family, and it was good to be home again. Long live the American road trip!
When Ted and I visited Jeff and La in El Centro, CA last spring, we saw what used to be the World’s Tallest Flagpole in Calipatria, CA. A little while after that, I accidentally learned that the tallest freestanding flagpole in North America is now on the Acuity Insurance campus near Sheboygan, WI–right along our route to visit Ted’s brother.
Calipatria is 184 feet below sea level, and its flagpole is 184 feet tall, so the top of the flagpole is at sea level. The flagpole on the Acuity Insurance campus, dedicated in June 2014, is 400 feet tall. It is billed as the World’s Tallest Symbol of Freedom. (The tallest freestanding flagpole in the world is in Cairo, Egypt.) The flagpole is anchored in 680 cubic feet of concrete reinforced with steel rods and weighs 420,000 pounds. The flag is 70 feet by 140 feet (9,800 square feet) and weighs 250 pounds. Each stripe is over 5 feet high, and each star is over 3 feet across. While driving on I-43, you can see the flag for about 10 minutes before you reach the site. At least 5 people are needed to safely lower the flag and to keep it from touching the ground. Acuity keeps six flags on hand at any given time.
Ok, been there, seen that.
We continued on to Ted’s brother’s home and spent several days visiting with him. You probably have to be from Wisconsin to know how to play sheephead, and you’d have to be a member of our family to know that I’m a pretty decent player, but I get a greatly unfair number of horrible hands dealt to me, and I usually lose. Well, this time was different! On our first evening together, I was the big winner! I had at least one queen in every hand, and several hands with three or four queens. Awesome! It’s almost embarrassing that it’s so rare for this to happen to me that Ted felt the need to immediately text the kids to let them know that I was the winner. Also, maybe embarrassing that they were probably all surprised. I guess I proved it could be done–just not very often. Things evened out, which is good. Ted won on the second evening, and Gary won on the third evening.
In addition to playing cards, we also spent time in conversation and exchanging/sharing family news. For meals, we visited some of our favorite restaurants in the area. Here’s a photo of the brothers.
Of course, Ted and I took time to pick up some real cheese from a local cheese factory (enough of Missouri’s grocery store cheese!) and some of our favorite pastries and hard rolls from a local bakery.
Again, you might have to be from Wisconsin to know what “hard rolls” are. When Ted and I lived in Maryland, we asked bakeries and grocery stores for hard rolls. Most just said, “No, we don’t have them,” but one grocer told us he thought they had some buns left from the day before, if we wanted them. Let me just say that “hard” is not equivalent to “stale.” In fact, the rolls are quite soft, so I don’t know where the name came from. They are made without eggs and become stale (hard?) very quickly, but they are perfect with hamburgers.
The next morning, we packed our luggage and bakery into the car and met Gary for one more lunch together. We all ordered breakfast, and it was delicious, as usual.
On the way out of the restaurant, I noticed this decorated tree in the lobby. It looks fall-themed, so I’m guessing they let it stand in the corner all year and change the decorations seasonally.
After our lunchtime breakfast, Ted and I headed south toward our home and Gary went north toward his. We had another good family visit.
I always look forward to getting together with my college friends. During my first three years of college, I became good friends with four members of the future Orchard Street Gang (OSG). Three of us (Eileen, Lin, and I) and a friend of Eileen’s (Lin), decided to live together off campus during the summer following our junior year. During that summer, we made plans to move to a larger house (located on Orchard Street) for our senior year, and we needed two more people to cover the rent, so Barb (another dormmate) and Carol were added to our group. Can you believe we each paid $50/month in rent and chipped in $5/week for groceries and the telephone?! We had a free subscription to the campus newspaper, but that’s an undercover story that I can’t tell here. We paid $150/semester for tuition, and books ran about $50/semester. The minimum wage at the time was $1.25/hour and an annual starting salary of $5,000–more, if you were lucky–was good pay, but even so, I can’t believe how much college costs now!
Only Lin had a car, and we all grocery shopped together. I have trouble now picturing six of us with a shopping cart, but that’s what we did. If we had money left over (more often than you would think), we stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a treat on our way home from the grocery store. The food we bought was for us and for our guests. Breakfast, lunch, and weekends were on our own for cooking and kitchen clean-up, and we had a rotating schedule to cook dinner Monday-Thursday. If you didn’t cook, you were on a rotating team of two to do the dishes. We each cleaned our own bedrooms (two of us per bedroom) and rotated cleaning the kitchen, dining room, living room, and two bathrooms. It was a great system, and we never had an argument or a fight. We all married our senior-year college sweethearts within a year of graduation, so we were well-acquainted with each other’s husbands too.
As young marrieds, with small children, we kept in touch, but we didn’t see each other in person as a group until 2018, 49 years later, when we met in Madison. Eileen suggested a group reunion and addressed her email to the “Orchard Street Gang”–and that’s how the OSG was officially formalized. I had seen Eileen and Leila several times because they live in WI where Ted and I regularly visit our families, but I hadn’t seen Lin or Carol in all those years. None of us was surprised that it felt like we’d just left college. We were still BFFs, and we laughed when we learned that we all used the Orchard Street cooking/cleaning rotation with our children as they grew up. Here’s our 2018 reunion photo.
Barb lived in FL, and I didn’t see her until 2020, when four of the OSG members had a Zoom reunion.
Leila, Eileen, and I have met in Madison a number of times–together or in pairs–since our college graduation, and we planned to do so again this year. Fortunately, Lin, who lives in MT, was in WI at the time, attending a workshop for two weeks, and could join us; unfortunately, Leila, who has Parkinson’s disease, was unexpectedly hospitalized for a minor Parkinson’s-related issue, so she couldn’t meet with us. Lin, Eileen, and I had a wonderful time together for a few hours, and here are the OSG-25 reunion attendees in the big chair outside the Great Dane restaurant. (See the logo on the chair back.) It goes without saying–but I’m going to say it anyway–that we’re looking forward to our next get-together.
It was nice to have an open day on Ted’s and my visit to Wisconsin. We slept late, had lunch followed by those fabulous desserts, and because the weather was so beautiful, we decided to stop in Wisconsin Dells for a boat tour. We’ve been there several times over the years, but the Dells boat tour is always beautiful. (Full disclosure: Several people and groups we wanted to spend time with were only available on certain days during our visit, so we had to schedule around them, giving us one extra day. This was it.)
The city of Wisconsin Dells is a huge and kitschy tourist trap with a lot of hotels and resorts, each of which features some tacky thing to make your kids want to stay there. For example, here’s some information about and a photo of one of the hotels. (Another source mentioned that it takes 10 minutes to tour the “White House.”) I saw these transformer figures at a different hotel, so they were probably added to the upside-down White House photo.
If you skip the tourist trap area like we did and go directly to the river docks on the “quiet side” of the city, you can take a peaceful, leisurely two-hour cruise through the Dells, a unique area on the Wisconsin River. No transformers included.
The dells (originally the “dalles”) were created when a huge glacial lake in central Wisconsin breached its ice dam about 11,000 years ago. The water rushed free in a catastrophic flood, and the force of the water and the sediment it carried and dropped formed the dells in less than a week–perhaps in as little time as three days. It is hypothesized that the noise of the fiercely rushing water could have been heard as far away as in the five surrounding states.
George Crandall’s family moved to the dells area in 1892. Over the years, whenever farmers wanted to sell their land, the family bought it, tore down the barns, and planted trees. It is said they planted over 37,000 trees in the area. The family failed in their effort to make the riverbank a national park, but they turned the land over to a foundation, which later sold it to the state DNR on the condition that it will never be developed. As a result, 11,000 years after the ice dam broke, Ted and I spent a wonderful two hours enjoying the beautiful scenery in the Wisconsin Dells.
Here’s the dock where the Dells tour begins and that’s our boat in the center.
While we were waiting to board the boat, this woman sat beside me, and I asked her if I could take a picture of her shirt. She told me she bought it when she went to Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont.
This was the beginning of our tour.
This rock formation is called “Black Hawk’s Profile.” Surprise! It’s also informally called “The Old Man of the River”–maybe by those who don’t know who Black Hawk was and can’t remember his name.
This is Witches’ Gulch, the first of two shore stops on the boat tour. Gulches like this were quickly carved by tributaries rushing out of the glacial lake when the ice dam broke. Deep in the gulch, we saw “Witches’ Falls” that empty into a pool named “Witches’ Bathtub.” Witches’ Gulch is a popular place for evening ghost tours.
Some of the rock formations were very narrow.
We felt pretty relaxed on our extra day.
As we walked back to our boat, the sun created a pretty scene in the gulch.
The second land stop on our boat tour was at Stand Rock. That would be the tower-like rock on the left in my photo. Stand Rock is 46 feet tall.
H.H. Bennett owned a photography studio near Wisconsin Dells. Due to the low demand for portraits, he decided to do landscape photography, and he took numerous pictures of the sandstone formations in the dells. He didn’t think two-dimensional pictures did justice to the scenery, so he started making stereoscopes. He sold them nationally, and that led to large numbers of people who wanted to visit the dells in person.
Meanwhile, Bennett worked on inventing a stop action shutter to take clear pictures of moving objects. His best-known stop action photo is an 1886 image of his son jumping across the Stand Rock formation. The gap between the two rocks is about five-and-a-half feet. It took 17 tries before Bennett successfully captured his son mid-air between the rock formations. When Boston audiences saw the photo below, they gasped!
The cost of insurance became too high to have humans jump between the rocks for tourists, so a dog makes the jump now. Rescue dogs are specially trained to do this, and you can see the net below that will catch the dog, if necessary. The dog does only one jump–right to left and then back, where his human counterpart has a treat for him. The dog is fast!!! He jumps over, turns around, and jumps back in only a few seconds. I cut this frame from my video. Those who tried to catch the dog mid-air on their stop action cameras missed it.
The dells come to an abrupt end and look like an ordinary riverbank beyond Stand Rock. This was the end point for our boat tour, so we headed back to the dock where we boarded the boat.
This is how the riverbank looks if you turn your head to the right of the above photo. We’re heading back into the dells.
On our way from the boat to our car, we saw this Corvette in a free parking lot. I told you it’s a kitschy tourist town.
It was a lovely, relaxing afternoon. We had a light dinner before leaving Wisconsin Dells and then we headed for Madison, our next stop.
The first stop on Ted’s and my visits to friends and family was the GC 25 event; the second scheduled stop was a visit with my Aunt Ruth. She lives in the LaCrosse area near her daughters, Lara and Linda, who are two of the six GCs (girl cousins), so Ted and I were loosely following Lara and Linda across the entire state from the east to the west. Aunt Ruth had a busy Sunday, but said she’d be happy to see us Monday afternoon.
Lara had to go back to work on Monday, but Linda was available to spend some extra time with us. We met her at her new house, and she gave us a tour. It’s a beautiful home in a brand-new subdivision. It’s so new that her yard is not yet sodded and her retaining wall is still under construction. It’s instantly obvious that, unlike Ted and me, she is a talented home decorator. After the home tour, we went to a local restaurant for lunch. Look at the delicious food we ordered.
After lunch, Linda went home, and Ted and I went to visit Aunt Ruth. She has always been my favorite aunt–maybe because she’s the aunt closest to my age. My mother was the oldest of six children, and Aunt Ruth was the youngest. She was 12 years younger than my mother and is only 13 years older than I am. Uncle Ken, Aunt Ruth’s husband, was always my favorite uncle too. I remember when they became engaged. He was movie-star handsome, and I was thrilled that she was going to marry someone like him. Sadly, Uncle Ken died 2 years ago at the age of 98.
Jessie, one of Aunt Ruth’s granddaughters, visited her at the same time we were there, so she took some pictures of us.
Aunt Ruth recently moved from her house to an assisted living facility where she has a very nice apartment, including 2 bedrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen and bathroom. She showed me her bedroom with the bedspread that was always on Grandma and Grandpa’s bed. Grandma crocheted the bedspread and now Aunt Ruth has it. Look at the detailed crochet work Grandma did. She loved doing what she called “handwork”–embroidery, crochet, knitting, etc. I wonder how long it took her to finish this piece of handwork.
After our visit with Aunt Ruth, Ted and I went to a local Italian restaurant for dinner. Ted’s lasagna, my spaghetti, and the desserts–cheesecake for Ted and spumoni ice cream for me–were out of this world! We had the entire following day to ourselves before we had to be in Madison for my Orchard Street Gang reunion (upcoming post) so, just for fun, we decided to stick around for a light lunch and then go back to the Italian restaurant for dessert. Neither of us could decide if we wanted the same thing again or if we wanted to order the opposite. Our final choice was to order one of each and split them so that we could both enjoy two great flavors. The waitress said that she was fully in tune with customers who ordered only dessert, and she insisted that it was easier to put the ice cream in two bowls than to have us split one. Doesn’t the picture below make your mouth water? This was the best spumoni ice cream and the best cheesecake either of us has ever had.
We ate every bite and had to remember our manners to keep from licking the dishes clean. 🙂
From LaCrosse to Madison is only a two-and-a-half hour drive, so we decided to stop in Wisconsin Dells for a boat tour along the way. Vacations with open schedules and family/friend visits are great!
There are six girl cousins on my mother’s side of the family. I’ve never heard of the six boy cousins getting together as a group, nor do they all attend every family event, but we girls have so much fun together that we go to extended family events and plan getaways just to see each other. In fact, we identify ourselves as the GCs. Here we are at Lara’s wedding in 1991. (A few of the boy cousins were present, but not all of them.)
Our next full-group gathering was at Aunt Katy and Uncle Gibby’s 50th wedding anniversary party in 1999. (Only two boy cousins were at this family event.)
Although we each see each other at various times, the next time the GCs gathered as a full group was in 2013 when we spent a weekend in Door County Wisconsin. We planned this getaway for the six of us because, as our extended family ages and people move to different parts of the country, large family events don’t happen as often as we’d like to see each other. Not to mention that all of our children were grown up and didn’t need us at home. Here we are on the hallowed ground of Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Go Packers!
While we were shopping in Egg Harbor (Door County), Lara found “our” sign.
Our most recent gathering was this one in early September–the GC-25, which stands for Girl Cousins-2025. Donna and her sister, Nancy, hosted us at Donna’s house in Lake Geneva, WI. On Friday evening we were greeted by the most beautiful charcuterie board I’ve ever seen, arranged by Nancy, who is the definition of “the hostess with the mostess.” She loves hosting parties and making gorgeous food displays. Even better, she’s good at both.
With a glass of wine and charcuterie to eat, the next order of business was to take a group photo. Judi is missing because she took the photo. While we ate, Nancy (waving at the end of the table) kept us laughing with a few party games and the weekend was off to our usual start–lots of chatter and even more laughter!
We started Saturday morning with brunch at Donna’s house and then–what else?–went shopping on the main street of Lake Geneva. The street is lined with boutique shops.
Nancy is deliberately picking her nose to photo-bomb my picture (above). Linda is not in the photo because she’s trying on a pair of jeans. She bought several articles of clothing and, as she tried things on and modeled them, we always took a group vote to decide whether or not she should buy the item. Linda won the prize for most purchases. On Saturday afternoon, she purchased so many things that a shopkeeper asked her if she’d like a large shopping bag that would hold all of her smaller bags. Then, before leaving, we had to return to two stores where she had left purchases that were larger than she wanted to carry for several hours.
Actually, Linda started shopping before she arrived at Donna’s house. As she and Lara (they are sisters and live near each other) were driving from their homes near LaCrosse, WI to Lake Geneva, Linda saw a car at a dealership along the way and stopped to buy it! She has/had two cars–a high-end Porsche and a Mercedes–but a driver made an illegal left turn as Linda was approaching an intersection and the other driver hit her Mercedes, totaling it. She’s been looking for a replacement vehicle, and the BMW caught her eye, so she bought it. She’s widowed, but says she needs two cars because the Porsche tires are over $1,500 each, so she doesn’t like to wear them out on long trips. (The rest of us have never had that problem.) Lara drove the new car the rest of the way to Donna’s house and Linda drove her Porsche.
But back to the shopping . . . We went into a candy store that featured freeze-dried gummies. I took a picture of one. They are very light and fragile. The shopkeeper offered to let us try one and it was delicious! They immediately dissolved in our mouths, leaving the sweet flavor of the gummy. I wanted to buy a bag to bring home, but the shopkeeper said they won’t travel well, which I believe, given how fragile they are and the fact that that were in cellophane bags.
After about two hours of walking, we were ready for a break, so we stopped for a beverage. Left to right, that’s Judi, Nancy, Linda, Donna, me, and Lara. Pay attention to how happy we all look in all of our pictures. We have so-o-o-o much fun together!
Nancy is a hoot and is probably the only one of us who would want her photo taken with a flag-draped bear. We all agree that Donna, Lara, and I are the “good” cousins. The other three–Linda, Nancy, and Judi–are the “bad” cousins. They don’t do anything illegal or immoral, but they are far more daring and extroverted than the “good” cousins. If any of us ever needs to be bailed out of jail, it will be one (or more) of the “bad” cousins. We “good” cousins have agreed to post bail if necessary. Together, the six of us are in perfect balance.
The downtown streets of Lake Geneva are punctuated with hanging flower baskets. Lake Geneva has been a retreat for extremely wealthy Chicagoans since the Gilded Age. One of them (I don’t remember his name) regularly hosted well-known celebrities. Donna (our resident cousin) said that, before the man died, you could be anywhere in town and say, “Is that a look-alike, or is it really Fill-in-the-Blank?” and it was really Fill-in-the-Blank. That man also hosted theme parties and sometimes invited members of the community to attend them. One party had a Wizard of Oz theme, complete with costumes and a yellow brick road. He hired little people to play the role of munchkins. For all of his life, the man was a philanthropist, contributing large sums of money to a variety of community needs. When he died, the man also left a large sum of money to the city, designated to purchase flower baskets like these every year for the central area of the city.
The shopping district ended at the shore of Lake Geneva (yes, the name of the city and of the lake), and we needed another group photo to add to our collections.
Here’s a picture of part of the lakefront. Oh, how I miss the glaciated sand-bottom lakes and rivers of Wisconsin! I never swam in a mud- or rock-bottomed lake until I moved away from Wisconsin. There’s no comparison.
I found a plethora of humorous signs along the sidewalks and in the stores. Here are some of them.
I guess every state needs something to brag about.
It’s no longer true, but when I was growing up in Wisconsin, the legal age for drinking beer was 18, and the legal age for drinking alcohol was 21. As a result, there were “teen bars” for the 18-20-year-olds. Once you aged out to 21, you didn’t go back to the teen bars. You were far too “adult” for that–and you can buy beer in a “21” bar if you want it. The teen bars were rowdy and, on the weekends, were usually filled to the fire code limit with standing room only and a waiting line to enter. The first time I was in a “21” bar, I was amazed at the nice seating (no one standing) and the quiet (you could converse without shouting).
After our shopping expedition, we attended a magic show. As you can see at the stage, there were smoke and mirrors and bright flashing lights. Naturally, we recognized that these are distractions so the audience doesn’t watch the magician’s hands. The theater was built by the magician and his wife (also his assistant when he needs someone to cut in half) and is small by design–only about 150 seats, with no bad seat in the house. It was a very good show, and the magician had a constant engaging patter of talk. Audience members participated in some of the tricks.
Yet another group picture of the GCs. The empty seat is Nancy’s.
After the show, the magician (left) and his assistant wife (right) go to the lobby to sign autographs and to stand for pictures with audience members.
Then it was time for dinner, including Jon and Ted.
Linda, Lara, Judi, and Nancy all traveled alone for the weekend, but Donna’s husband, Jon, lives at her house and Ted was with me for a nine-day trip to visit Wisconsin and Illinois friends and family. Jon and Ted enjoy each other’s company, so they spent the weekend time together. I’m sure they enjoyed that a lot more than listening to the GCs’ constant chatter and laughter. We all have (or had–two of the GCs are widowed) great husbands who like each other. We were talking about our wonderful mates at dinner and decided we needed a toast. We raised our glasses and said, “To our men!”
It was a long and fun-filled day so after dinner, it was time to relax.
The constant talk and storytelling continued, and we definitely exemplified Judi’s belief that “nobody knows your crazy family better than your cousins.” There were so many hilarious stories to tell! My favorites were those about Grandma Drott, Nancy’s and Donna’s other grandma. We all knew Grandma Drott because we all grew up within about 15 miles of each other, and Grandma Drott lived within that radius and was a regular visitor to Nancy and Donna’s home.
At one point, we started talking about the magic show and tried to figure out how the magician did some of the tricks. This is one of them and we had lots of suggestions about how to do it.
I surprised myself by figuring it out, and then we needed a teaching session. Nancy didn’t believe it and started searching Google. I thought magicians’ secrets were never, never, ever shared, but somebody tattled to Google, and the trick worked exactly as I said. Yay for me! Now I know how to perform one magic trick. We also figured out how to do three of the magician’s other tricks–even without Google’s help.
Everyone except Ted and me stayed at Donna’s house. Donna (a “good” cousin) told me she and Jon went to bed after Ted and I left to go to our motel (at past 1:00 a.m.), but the other four had a pajama party before they went to sleep.
From the time Ted and Jon joined the GCs, the two of them hardly said a word because, as I’ve mentioned, the GCs together don’t stop talking or laughing. I apologized to Ted for his having to endure the entire evening with “my” group, but he said it was actually fun to watch us in action. I told Donna this the next morning, and she said the same thing about her and Jon. Yes, we all found wonderful husbands.
We had brunch at Donna’s house again on Sunday morning, and then it was time to leave–but not before taking another group photo.
As all of us were gathering up our things and heading for our cars (Donna and Jon were going to their granddaughter’s soccer game), I heard Jon tell Ted, “Now comes the Lorenzen farewell and that’ll be another half-hour.” Yes, that’s true. (Jon and Ted have been married to Donna and me for many years, and have been through these farewells many times.) Good-bye hugs were followed by more family stories, which then required another round of good-bye hugs followed by another round of stories, followed by . . . You get the picture. It took about a half-hour, spot-on for Jon’s timing, before we got into our cars. As each car left, the driver gave two quick horn toots in memory of Grandpa, who always tooted his horn twice after he backed out of the driveway and started down the road.
We have so much fun together and we look forward to our group gatherings so eagerly that we decided to do this more often. The consensus was that two years will be good, with hostess duties rotating. I was chosen as the next hostess and I’ve already been given a list of activities that the others want to do at GC-27–STL. What a wonderful group we are! Let’s hear it for the GCs!
Yesterday was a memorable day in our neighborhood. It started when Ted went to Huck’s to get his daily cup of coffee. As he was leaving the parking lot to come home, the exit he regularly uses was blocked off. He turned to use the other exit and saw a long stream of cars rushing out of a nearby parking lot (that we now realize was a staging site) and speeding down the road toward our house. Because of the road barrier, Ted had to take a longer route home, changing course repeatedly, due to more barriers, including one at the street behind our house. He parked and decided to walk the short distance home. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), a county police officer stationed at the corner told him to get back into his car and wait.
Meanwhile, I was at home with two carpenters who are installing new cabinets in our laundry room (which faces the street) when I heard one of them say, “What’s going on??!!” I got up to look out the window. We saw a stream of cars (the same ones Ted saw a mile away a few minutes before) rapidly passing our house without even pausing at the stop sign at the corner. The cars–at least 18 that we could see–lined the curb across the street from us, and law enforcement officers–at least 23, including FBI, ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations), St. Charles County police, and two medics–jumped out of their cars and surrounded the house across the street from us where our friend, Peggy, used to live.
All of this was done in silence–unmarked cars, no sirens, and every officer running directly to his previously designated place to cover every side of the house and property. There are five officers on the side of the house in the photo below–two behind the tree (one on each side of it), two clearly visible, and one behind the officer in the right center of the photo. The two officers beside the white vehicle are the drone operators.
It’s hard to see in the photo below because of the tree branches, but there are nine officers lined up in front of the garage and every one of them has a rifle. All those weapons definitely boosted my heart rate and blood pressure! Three other officers had already breached the front door (standing open) and were inside the house. Two drones were sent into the house as well.
Because the carpenters are using our driveway for their vehicles and saw, Ted and I are parking our cars on the street. That’s my one-year-old car that the armed officer is using for protection. I couldn’t help picturing the driver’s side of my car riddled with bullet holes. It was time to take cover. I went to a back room on the other end of our house–out of the direct line of fire–and one of the carpenters decided to do some of the work on the agenda for our basement. The other carpenter, Christopher, shrugged and started his video recorder. Part of his video is at the end of this post.
Fortunately, no shots were fired, and handcuffed residents were peacefully escorted out of the house. I counted 18 people in handcuffs, three of whom also wore leg shackles.
This is the drone officer preparing a second drone to send into the house, . . .
. . . and here he goes, ready to launch Drone #2.
Roughly three hours later, everything was under control. The handcuffed people had been taken away; others were no longer restrained and were standing around, chatting with the officers, like the lady at the rear of the van in the driveway. The officer bending over in the lower right of the photo is going through some of what could be evidence or supplies in the box. I didn’t go outside to ask her. I’m guessing that the man (St. Charles County police) and woman (FBI) in the left center are congratulating each other on a well-coordinated mission. The streets were opened to traffic again and pedestrians were walking by, no doubt wondering “What’s going on here?”
After the enforcement officers left the scene, the reporters arrived and knocked on doors (including ours), asking for information from neighbors who witnessed the activity. Channels 2 (and their sister station, Channel 11), 4, and 5 were all here. I think only one neighbor agreed to speak with a reporter. Ironically, she was at her exercise class during the operation and–like Ted–was only allowed to access her house after the danger of civilian injuries was past. Christopher offered his video but refused an interview.
A few hours later, local TV channels played Christopher’s video and reported that this event had been a triple sting. Two homes with about 20 residents in each, as well as the nearby, very popular Golden Apple Buffet were raided simultaneously. The residents of both homes were employees of the Golden Apple Buffet. I have seen five of the residents coming and going from the house across the street since the law enforcement personnel left, so I assume that not everyone who lived there was guilty of whatever illegal activity might have been going on. I’m sure we’ll learn more details in the coming days.
Note: I had to cut Christopher’s video to make it fit this blog, and the cutting app takes credit at the end, as you’ll see. Around the 20-second mark of the video, right after the line of officers enters the house, you can see the drone flying across the center of the screen from to right to left. It has two headlights.
