Chasing Winter North
It seems to me like every Wisconsinite takes a periodic “trip up north” to get away from their normal everyday lives. I’ve been in Wisconsin for about three months now, and this is one of the local behaviors about which I’ve been told with enough regularity to consider it a characteristic. There are exceptions, of course. There are those Wisconsinites who say that they instead prefer trips to the Wisconsin Dells (and there are some who like both locations, of course), but they seem to be in the minority. The default Wisconsin get away, especially late in the year, seems to be the popular “trip up north”.
Having not lived in Green Bay for too long yet, I’m still discovering, on a daily basis, a seemingly unconquerable number of local places, events, and activities I’d like to see or do. That didn’t stop me, however, from deciding that my partner and I should take the fabled “trip up north” to celebrate Valentine’s weekend. It’s true that on some level I just wanted to join the crowd, to proudly tell everyone I was going on a “trip up north”, and to be able to have “trip up north” stories to tell after I got back. There were practical reasons to choose this time to go too, though. For one thing, some time spent alone together in a cabin out in a natural environment seemed to lend itself to celebrating the couple’s holiday. For another thing, there was a drastically discounted rate during what was considered…