BOXES 252-253: Mostly Wisconsin.

You're standing on the grounds of Whistling Straits Golf Course, north of Sheboygan along Lake Michigan, looking up toward the clubhouse from a viewpoint normally available only to golfers and staff. It's August 2004, when the PGA had its Championship tournament at this recently built course. As it happened, Becky (whom you've met in many previous BOXES) worked for the Kohler Corporation and had some free passes to watch some practice games during the week. As you see in the distance, special stands and screens had been constructed for visitors.

I'll show the rest of the PGA photos later in this post--which will otherwise be mostly family snapshots. It was a fairly busy summer after Anne and I got back from Hawai'i in June. (See previous BOX for photos of that trip.) My Hawai'i slides are immediately followed by several of a party for Michelle (you've met her too in many posts) with her high-school girlfriends. Since it was June (though almost everyone looks very tanned), the party must have been for Michelle's 21st birthday. The photo at the bottom of this set strikes me because it's the only posed one--and it managed to get everyone facing the camera and smiling.

Various other pics taken in our house fill up the rest of this slide box. One shows Becky's old boyfriend, Lucas, who was in town and having dinner with us--I have no idea what the occasion was, but the soup looks good. Also, Jim and Dottie, my brother and sister-in-law, were visiting--this might have been when they were taking a driving trip out west:

For some reason our grandson Forest was trying on Halloween outfits: a Max costume that Tiffany must have made him, and a dinosaur outfit that Anne had made for Aron many years previous:

Here's Tiffany with Sam, who would have outgrown these particular costumes:

My next slide box is filled mostly with the Whistling Straits PGA photos. This is one of those boxes where the slides were unnumbered and mixed up, so I can only guess at their chronological order as I digitally scanned them. In any case, on that day in 2004 I spent an entire afternoon walking all over the course, watching the various famous golfers (e.g., Vijay Singh, who won the tournament) at their practice games but wandering from hole to hole rather than following any player in particular. The Irish-links-style course, stretching for two miles along Lake Michigan, has stunning views in every direction. (This was the "Straits Course"; there is an inland "Irish Course" but I don't recall that any of the Championship games were played there.) You can guess from the following photos how challenging the course is, and possibly how strenuous it was, by the end of the day, for me to be clambering up over rises to see the golfers from various angles; and you can see how fine a day it was, even if mostly cloudy. I'll show the next eight shots without comment:

If I remember rightly, the last hole or two involved hitting the ball up over quite a number of sand traps toward the clubhouse in order to reach the green..

I think it was closer to evening when I took these last four photos:

There was an entertainment area beyond one end of the course, with food and drink plus music. Here is a performance near sunset:

Around the time of the PGA conference we made a visit to Aron and family's farmhouse on the edge of West Bend, where Anne's brother Jim and his sons, Eric and Adam, were visiting from Sacramento. (You've met them in several previous posts.) I assume these chickens were Aron's:

Here are Jim's boys on a swing set with our grandsons--the focus is poor but I'll include this shot for the record of their visit. From left to right it's Sam, Adam, Eric and Forest. Anne and I went to Chicago with Jim and his boys, presumably soon after. We must have done more than visit Millennium Park, but that was the only place where I took photos. Here are Eric and Adam posing below the Bean (officially "Cloud Gate"):

And here's Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion:

Lastly are a couple of photos in the shade: one of Anne at the Crown Fountain and one of a wedding party walking up from Michigan Avenue, presumably on their way to photo ops:

The last two pictures in this slide box are of a boat ride we took with Aron, Tiffany and the kids on the Sheboygan River. In the first, we're actually in the harbor, with the Blue Harbor complex in the background; in the second, we're somewhere upriver:

I'm coming close to the end of my slide boxes: only two left, unless I find a couple that went missing years ago. I'll show pics from 2005 and 2006 in the next two posts.