Exploring Guttenburg

This time of year, Guttenburg is smack dab in the middle of a fall traffic pattern. Leaf watchers travel this portion of the Great River Road to see the colors of fall flare up before it all goes brown. Monday, Linda and I join in and took a look. We started with a walk around the very attractive little town of Guttenburg. The bluff overlooking the town was dotted with color but wasn't really at it's peak yet. From time to time, as we were walking, we'd find a particularly nice tree or vine.

As we walked along the river, we saw a boy on the other side of the street walking to school. As the school came into sight, so did nearly a dozen other kids, all coming from various directions, converging on that one point. It was pretty cool to see.

It was also kind of odd that the school overlooks Lock and Dam #10. If you drew a line down the dam, you'd hit the school nearly in the center. I'm guessing that, over the years, several of the students have gazed out the window at the barges working their way through the locks just outside the classroom window.

As we continued our walk along the river, we had nice opportunities to take a few of those very close up photos of tiny flowers along the way. The image in the center is actually a self propelled maintenance platform with permanently mounted scaffolding and cement mixer and all sorts of work tools. We watched it pull up along side the cement wall in the lower left corner of the picture; evidently some work needed to be done there.

On our way back, we had a good laugh at someone's excellent addition to the driftwood tree. I'm not sure you can see it without expanding the image but there's a blue eye and pink lips on the pointy end of that log. With the way that log rises up out of the water, it's a dead ringer for a "Loch Ness Monster" kind of critter.