Next Up – Oshkosh!

The EAA Airventure ended on Monday at noon, so we moved our campsite 5 miles east to a beautiful small campground right on Lake Winnebago. We stayed in the area because the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh hosts an Archives Resource Center and we were told that we might find vital records for some of our ancestors who had lived in the nearby counties. 

We headed over to UW Oshkosh and found a few vital records which was more than we found in Dodge County, but it was still disappointingly less than I had hoped. The good news was that we realized that we were not very far from the college that Russ’ grandfather had attended in the early 1900s (1906 to 1910). We visited their library and found a wealth of pictures and some information on his grandfather’s activities via the yearbooks from those years. The historian found his transcripts and we got a copy of those also! He was a solid B+ student, but what I found interesting was he did not have a specific major.  He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts (he took no science or math classes) and actually got a masters because he stayed a year longer and took more classes. He went on to Garrett Theology school and became a Methodist minister. 

The visit to this campground ended with a night of thunderstorms and strong winds.

The view from our campsite. Don't know if the lighthouse is functional but it sure is pretty.

You can find these wildflowers all along the roadsides, along with blue and yellow wildflowers.

A heron visited our site one day.

Lunch one day was at a drive-in place with skating waitresses.  The place has been around since the 1940s and is very popular with the locals. We enjoyed bratwurst sandwiches, a staple in Wisconsin.