2017.06.20 - Pelican Lake, WI

2017.06.20 - Pelican Lake, WI

Yesterday evening, Jerry ventured out in the search for sunset pictures.  This RV park is beautiful, right on the Pelican Lake, with tall trees and green grass.  These are some of his lake pictures.

We ventured out today even though rain clouds threatened; so we get a lil wet, so what?  After lunch, we stopped at the Pelican Lake town hall to take a few pictures.  There were wood sculptures of a pelican, a bear and an eagle.  Here’s the bear:

There isn’t much to do around here but we read about a house built of stovewood.  Neither of us knew what that was so off we go about 5 miles outside Pelican Lake to Jennings, WI.  I’m not sure what the population of Jennings is but it can’t be more than 10.  We saw two bars, one open the other not. The building below was made using the stovewood method characterized by “short-cut logs stacked and joined by mortar or clay.”  The pictures do the explaining.

We weren’t ready to go back to the coach so we headed to Rhinelander, a little larger town about 20 miles away.  While having ice cream we found a train museum on-line that sounded interesting.  Once we got there we discovered it was much more than that.  It had separate buildings for a one room schoolhouse, a sawmill, a CCC camp museum, a blacksmith shop, several actual trains and quite a bit of other locomotive stuff.  It was very interesting.

In this picture, the green creature is called a Hodag.  It is Rhinlander's equivalent to the jackalope

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We learned how teachers made duplicate copies by the hectograph method, invented in 1869 long before the blue mimeograph copies we remember.  The teacher would make this jelly from gelatin, sugar, glycerin and one other ingredient and pour it into a wooden frame.  We touched gel and it felt like jello.  To make a copy the teacher used a special pencil to write or draw the subject onto normal paper, that copy was put face down and rubbed into the gel.  Much of the pencil lead was actually absorbed by the gel.  The original was removed and a clean sheet of paper was placed on the gel and the pencil lead was rubbed in.  The clean sheet was now copy.  The gel would make up to 8 copies.  Pretty cool!