Around Lake Monona - This Time For Real

Last Spring, I made my initial, unsuccessful foray to walk around Lake Monona. This time: Mission Accomplished! It took me 2 hours and 40 minutes to make it the 11.56 miles from my house to my house. Here's the view from halfway:

I've discovered that there are many, many parks along the rim of Lake Monona. And, unlike my neighborhood, much of the lake is accessible public property, especially around the Isthmus. It's in Monona that people have gobbled up the shoreline with lakeside condos and homes.

I've also discovered that there are several effigy mounds on the hills of the northeast side of the lake. In fact, there's a statue commemorating the effigy mounds called the Effigy Tree, pictured here:

About 3/4 of the way through, I stopped in at a place that I've wanted to visit for a long time, but never took the time to do so: Rossi's Vintage Arcade. It is exactly what it purports to be, an old skool video game and pinball arcade attached to a pizzeria. I saw in there, with my own two eyes, a cave containing my childhood. Wall-to-wall video games, each only $.25 (except for a couple of $.50 pinball games). I know where my monthly allowance is going. Tempest, Galaga, Missile Command, Joust, and, yes, even the Twilight Zone Pinball Game, and a bevy of others are all there, like a resurrected graveyard of my past. I'm not going to lie, people, I almost cried. Seriously. For some reason I have a hankering to go watch Heavy Metal and stay up all night playing AD&D (the *real* version - 1st Edition)! Incidentally, it looks like French TV is going to be doing a TV series based on Metal Hurlant, aka Heavy Metal Magazine. I'll need to learn French now.

Alas, I still had to travel on and my legs reminded me of my age. So I stopped and snapped a photo of this Little Free Library in Monona:

For the uninitiated, the Little Free Library is a volunteer program where citizens buy an artistic . . . well, little library, and set it up in their yard. You walk by, you take a book, you replace it with another book. Unfortunately, most of the books in this one were tripe disguised with the words "New York Times Best Seller". Not to say that NYT can't have a bestseller that's a good book, but none of these were those. There was even one in there by Jodi Picoult. By the way, if Jodi Picoult is your favorite author and you and I somehow became goodreads friends, we'd better end the relationship now. It'll be best for both of us, trust me.

So there you have it. My epic trek around Lake Monona. I'll have to do it again sometime . . . after the lake has frozen and rethawed. In the meantime, I've got some arcade games to play.