House Guests

Over the last two months we have had lots of family come to visit us. We have been lucky enough to have both sets of parents come and visit us as well as McKay's sister Cecily's family and my sister Melissa. We have never really had house guests before. With the exception of living in China we have always lived somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes away from both of our families. If one of McKay's sisters came in to town they stayed with his parents or sisters, not with the little brother in the one or two bedroom apartment. It has been both exciting and stressful having house guests. It has been awesome that we have had the chance to see so many of our family members even though we moved so far away. I guess they must love us and miss us and think we are awesome or something like that.

Playing host and hostess multiple times over the last little while has given us the opportunity to be tourists as well. In planning fun things to do with our family we ended up getting to do the fun things too. We have gone down to a cheese factory called Alp and Dell cheese in Monroe WI multiple times now and taken their brief tour. We have also visited a little Swiss town called New Glarus multiple times and visited the cute shops there and eaten at a Swiss restaurant called the Glarner Stube and at a Swiss bakery and a chocolate and cheese shop. New Glarus is always worth the 30 minute drive.

We also got to go visit the House on the Rock which is about an hour away in the middle of the country. That place is bizarre. It is a seriously crazy place. It is very interesting and there is a lot to see, but there is a slight creepiness factor too it. They guy who built it did not seem to be 100% in his right mind and some of the things he collected were just a little weird. I would recommend seeing it once just for the novelty of it, but since we spent 4 hours walking through the actual house and all of the exhibit halls each time I think 8 hours of the House on the Rock are more than enough for me. The coolest part of the House on the Rock has got to be the infinity room. It is like a hallway lined in glass that just out over the forest for about 200 feet and has nothing below it holding it up. I am scared of heights so I had a hard time with it, but the view was incredible.

We have also had the chance to visit the Madison Zoo, the Wisconsin State Capital, The shops downtown around the Capital including a specialty cheese shop, The Wisconsin Veterans Museum, a Frank Lloyd wright building called Monona Terrace,  a couple of other shopping centers in Madison, the UW Madison Business school and a lot of different restaurants. We also spent a lot of time at our house playing with Madelynn. She LOVES having people there to play with her and constantly pay attention to her.

Thank you everyone who came to visit us. It was wonderful to see you and it was fun to get to experience a little bit more of Madison with you.

Now here are some of the pictures: