The Driftless Area offers beautiful rural bed and breakfasts, places to call home for a couple of days while enjoying your loved one’s company. Curl up to your own fireplace and soak in a hot whirlpool tub. Be pampered at breafast with unique country cuisine prepared for just you, not for a noisy room full of diners.

If you choose your lodging wisely, you can hike right outside your door.  Whether it’s snowshoeing in the winter months, or hiking down private forested trails in the warmer weather. You may be dazzled by a palette of gaudy woodland wildflowers or serenaded by flock of early summer songbirds.

Most B&Bs offer lovely patio areas and some even offer large ponds with private gazebos and a babbling waterfall. Bring your loved one to the country. Relax, talk, feast you senses on all the beauty that surrounds you.

I was driving on Hwy 35 near the Lynxville dam a few days ago and in a 30 second drive by I counted five eagles. One day in December 2010 I crossed the Hwy 18 bridge travelling from Prairie du Chien to Marquette, Iowa. On that drive across the Mississippi and its backwaters I saw more than 10 eagles. These winter eagles congregate around any open water  to fish and enjoy lunch or dinner, maybe even breakfast. Eagles can be seen diving into the water and snatching a fish, or standing on the ice enjoying a meal, or circling overhead looking for a fish, or perched in a nearby tree just waiting their turn.

On Saturday, Feb 25, 2012, the Prairie du Chien Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with Effigy Mounds National Monument (located in Iowa a few miles north of the Hwy 18 bridge) will sponser Bald Eagle Appreciation Day. Activities will run from 9 am until 4:30 pm and will include a live raptor program, nature film, eagle photography, and a life size eagle nest replica. Outdoor viewing with spotting scopes will be offered. Prairie du Chien offers great dining and lodging, so come and make a day of it. Couple this with a trip to Cabelas Outdoor Store in Prairie du Chien, a long drive on Hwy 35 along the beautiful Mississippi River, or a drive eastward to the Kickapoo River Valley and the quaint villages of Crawford and Vernon Counties. Nice winter time in Wisconsin.

Southwest Wisconsin is particularly blessed with hundreds of cold water streams. This is the Driftless Area, a part of the midwest that was not glaciated during the last period of North American glaciers. This land was spared the glaciers and therefore it retained its rugged topography of repeated ridges and valleys. Karst geology underlies the Driftless Area and the porous sandstone and limestone rock spawns thousands of cold water springs that emerge on the hillsides and in the valleys. Between Viroqua and Boscobel, Wisconsin the springs combine and form a maze of streams that then find their way to the Mississippi, the Wisconsin, or the Kickapoo rivers.  

Superb trout fishing can be found in most of this area’s streams and small rivers: Knapp Creek, Tainter Creek, Reads Creek, Copper Creek, Citron Creek, Rush Creek, the Bad Axe River, the West Fork of the Kickapoo River, Sugar Creek, English Run, Mill Creek and many others. Brook, Rainbow, and Brown trout are found throughout these creeks. Many streams have been improved by Trout Unlimited and many streams remain totally natural.

Good dining and lodging is available. Tackle and guide service is available at the Driftless Angler Fly Shop in Viroqua. If you want a multi-species fishing trip, combine the stream time with time spent on the Mississippi River. On this section of the big river you will find big walleye, big northern, and big bass. In addition you will find that the Driftless Area scenery is just as good as the fishing.

The opening ceremony happens at 7pm on Saturday, Feb 3. Competition follows immediately and fireworks will entertain visitors in between rounds of jumping. From 9 pm until 1 am enjoy live music. Food and beverages are available on the grounds. On Sunday the competition resumes at 12:30 pm. Live music follows the jumping from 3 to 7 pm on Sunday.

Westby has a deep and persistent Norwegian heritage. Enjoy the city and surrounding areas. This is the Driftless Area and the countryside is a progression of ridges and valleys. Very good restaurants can be found in Westby, Viroqua, Readstown, and Soldiers Grove. The Mississippi River is a short 30 minute drive to the west. Clean motels and beautiful B&Bs are available for overnight lodging. Hike at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve or at Wildcat Mountain State Park. Drive along the Mississippi River and you will undoubtedly see many bald eagles that winter in this area.

This is a very special winter weekend in Southwest Wisconsin.

On Sept 10/11 travel to Prairie du Chien and the Villa Louis to enjoy the annual Carriage Classic. The Villa Louis is one of Wisconsin’s state historic sites. It is a beautifully restored Victorian house that was home to Wisconsin’s first millionaire family, the Dousmans. The Villa has a long history of horse breeding and elegance and the Carriage Classic will bring more than 100 beautifully restored carriages to the grounds for demonstrations of horsemanship and carriage driving.

Carraige Classic at Villa Louis

Then on Sept 17/18 enjoy one of the best art festivals in the entire state, the Driftless Area Art Festival in Soldiers Grove. Eighty artists from across the Driftless Area will show their artwork – paintings, sculptures, pottery, woodcraft, photography, and jewelry. This juried art show will feature day long music performed by local musicians playing an eclectic mix of folk and bluegrass music that fits perfectly into the rugged landscape that surrounds the art festival grounds. 

While at the art festival sample local foods, wine, and beer as you stroll past the artists’ displays. Talk with the artists, all of whom make their home in one of the midwest’s more scenic areas. Stay for a few nights in a lovely B&B and maybe bring your fly rod along and spend some time in a local trout stream leaving your cares behind you.

Havin' fun at the Kickapoo Country Fair

The fair offers many interesting activities, but of course, is all about food, lots of food; locally grown or raised, fresh and organic.  There is plenty of food, as the Driftless Region boasts the largest concentration of organic farms in the U.S.

So get the family in the car and come on down to the Kickapoo Country Fair.  There is something for everyone; from nationally recognized guest speakers, to food and wonderful music, to  displays by local vendors and artisans.  Once you are here, you will see that there are many ways to have fun and experience the Driftless Region: canoeing, biking , hiking, horse trails, antiquing, and visiting the Amish shops.

Enjoy a delicious dinner, with organic or locally produced foods, at a country diner small enough to fit in most suburban living rooms. As evening deepens and the daylight fades walk to a gazebo that sits alongside a peaceful pond, listen to the frogs sing their night time serenade, and enjoy a glass of wine and bowl of cold, fresh strawberries for dessert.

Stay at an elegant country B&B. Allow the innkeepers to suggest daytime activities that will allow you to wander across a rural landscape as dramatic as any you will find in the midwest. Allow your eyes and mind to absorb a landscape of a hundred ridges and valleys, a myriad of cold, trout filled streams, and a patchwork of sculpted farm fields painted all shades of green. Drive roads that are never straight for very very long, but instead continually wind left then right as they navigate through the terrain of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area.

Spend a romantic weekend like this, and we think that you’l want to do it over and over again.

More than 1000 people will participate in the re-enactment of battles, medical treatment of the wounded, and camp and social life. Cannon and musket fire will fill the fields with smoke. See portrayals of blacksmiths, coopers, ice cream socials, and even the dances of the day. At the re-enactment you can enjoy good food and music played on period instruments. Boscobel is home to the last Grand Army of the Republic Hall in the state of Wisconsin, and it will be open for visitors to view a variety of era memorabilia.

Relive the Civil War during its 150-year anniversary in Boscobel, Wisconsin

Boscobel is located on Highway 61 in Southwest Wisconsin. The area surrounding Boscobel includes the Wisconsin River and the beautiful bluffs of the Driftless Area. Couple this activity with a day on the Mississippi River in Prairie du Chien, a short distance away. Or drive north on Highway 131 through the Kickapoo Valley and enjoy small town food and hospitality.

The Kickapoo Valley has become a destination for silent sport enthusiasts. Opportunities abound for quality hiking, biking, canoeing, birding, trout fishing, …. Amish shopping and antiquing offer post-exercise options for visitors. The area is prized for its scenic motor touring routes as the local roads wind their way over and through hundreds of ridges and valleys. The land, scuplted thousands of years ago, is the attraction. There are no nightclubs, go-cart tracks, or neon signs but instead there are rugged bluffs, deer, turkey, eagles, and B&Bs.

The Inn at Lonesome Hollow offers beautiful B&B rooms, a cabin, and two bedroom suites and 160 acres of wooded hills, trails, and wildlife.

The Roth House offers grand B&B rooms in a restored Victorian house that sits right next to the Kickapoo River.

The Old Oak Inn’s B&B rooms and parlors feature elegant European milled woodwork and a large banquet room and space for any size private party. 

Soldiers Grove is a great base of operations for a day or a week of travel through the Kickapoo Valley and Wisconsin’s Driftless Area.

Vanetta Chapman with Nora

Last week, Lonesome Hollow hosted Vanetta Chapman and her husband, from Texas.  Vanetta came to Wisconsin to research the Wisconsin Amish for her upcoming  book  series of Amish mysteries.   Her book, ” A Simple Amish Christmas” was published last October, and she has  begun releasing a series of books called the Shipshewana Amish Mystery Series. ” Falling to Pieces,  A Quilt Shop Mystery” will be released November, 2011.

Vanetta writes in her blog about her visit to our area:  “I visited Wisconsin this week in order to meet some of the local Amish folk for my upcoming Pebble Creek series (Harvest House, 2012). I’m so glad I did. Not only are the Wisconsin Amish lovely people, but they’re very different from the Amish communities I visited in Indiana.

And isn’t that to be expected? After all, if you came to Texas, you’d find things vastly different where I live in a small town in the hill country than where I used to live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. To some extent people are the same–true. We have common beliefs and roots. But other things change with the area around you.

I could have read about Cashton, Soldiers Grove, and Baraboo on the internet … but I couldn’t have seen how to make a rug on a loom, or visited a furniture store, or talked to an older Amish gentlemen as he explained about his grandchild who was sick and in a local hospital. Those are things I needed to be here to experience, and I’m grateful that I did. Now when I boot up my computer and write–I hope I’ll be able to share with you the heart of the Amish people in Cashton and the surrounding area. You can let me know how I did, next June.”

This is  absolute best part of innkeeping!  Meeting such interesting and wonderful people like Vanetta and her husband, Bob!