Madison and home....

Our Madison Adventures continue...

Our time in Madison is coming to a close but we still have a little more adventure to share.

Still awaking rather early, we had a light breakfast and set off on the short journey out of town to Sutter Ridge Pumpkin Patch where we had a great time exploring the farm, playing the barnyard games and marvelling at the 'problem solving' goats. We then took the 'Hay Ride' to the pumpkin patch where Jasmin and Victoria selected a couple of pumpkins of their own.

Fortifying ourselves for the day with an apple cider doughnut we drove on to the small town of Cross Plains where we had our first open house viewing of the day, a really delightful little house built in 1948, well within our price range. The house was lovely, but, a bit further out of town than we wanted and the bedrooms were on the small side.

We then drove into the centre of Middleton and had a lovely coffee and shared a bite of lunch at Barriques Victoria and I shared a feta and hummus wrap while Jasmin had the soup, all very tasty, we plan to have many more lunches here.

It was now time for our next open house viewing on Friendship Lane in Middleton. This house had a lovely garden but the rest was horrible, as I write in December seven weeks later this place is still up for sale and knocked down by $30,000. Still not interested.

As we were in Middleton and Victoria seems unable to pass either a Michaels or Bath and Bodyworks without going in we dropped onto Greenway Station to check out both and also popped into the World Market store on the site. They have a European foods section and we were delighted to find that we can buy Rich Tea biscuits.

Time to go to our final house viewing at 6206 Camino Way, from the outset we were not sure about this one, not really the right location for us and a few things going against it. But wow, this place is perfect and I note that it is still on the market. If we were looking to buy straight away then this is the property we would go for. The realtor 'Barb' was a great help and I think we will contact her again when we do come to look.

That's enough house hunting, we now had another mission to enjoy a beer on the Memorial Union Terrace and watch the sun go down over Lake Mendota.

It is rather a lovely view, but there is a lot of building work taking place at the moment and rather spoils the terrace, hopefully, we can have some good times here next year.

After watching the sun go down we took some photos on State Street, I quite like this one looking up towards the Capitol building.

It was time to leave the city and head back towards our apartment. Unfortunately, I got rather lost trying to get back and the 20 minute journey took well over an hour and I was quite tired and grumpy when we arrived. I cheered myself up by picking up a pint of frozen custard (peanut butter cup flavour) from Culvers, I suppose we shall never find out what a Butter Burger is!

It was our last night and I was certainly ready for bed and was soon sound asleep.

We had a light breakfast on the left-overs in the fridge and the pumpkins were put up for adoption! Our final drive into Middleton and we enjoyed having another look around the locale that will hopefully be our home before checking out the apartments at Deer Creek.

These apartments are lovely and the site has great amenities. Another bonus is that they are situated a five minute walk from the office. Of all the apartments seen so far I think that this is where we would most like to stay and we have already started the process of applying for one.

It was time to head back to O'Hare, we made sure we paid all the tolls this time and were soon in the massive roadworks around the airport and had a 45 minute excursion in heavy traffic to fill up with gas so that those gits at Hertz did not charge us a fortune to fill it.

At the airport we dropped off the car and were soon at the terminal and checked in, then joined a 45 minute queue to get through security. Once air-side we browsed the shops and had an evening meal at Wolfgang Pucks before boarding our American Airlines flight back to the UK.

The food on the way back was nowhere near as nice as on the way out, but after watching Inside Out we all got some shut-eye before landing back in Manchester at 0630 and driving home to catch up on some sleep.