None of us were able to leave work early. Traffic and construction slowed us down. I remembered everything I wanted to bring except I left Robin’s bag of snacks in front of her house and completely forgot the La Croix. Our four-person tent did not have a rain fly and the forecast was predicting a chance of rain on Saturday or Sunday. Normally, I would be losing my cool a little bit in these conditions, but on this day I was so excited for the actualization of the long-planned Pizza Farm Camping Trip, that I held it together pretty well. I put my faith in Robin and Bea, the more experienced campers, looked ahead at an itinerary of pizza, New Glarus, farms, and the woods, and decided that things were going to be alright.
Since we weren’t able to beat rush hour and our first stop on the Pizza Farm Tour was over two hours away, we decided to go directly to Suncrest Gardens Farm and risk setting up our campground in the dark. Besides, without our snacks and drinks, we were hungry and thirsty! We showed up at Suncrest Gardens Farm a little on the later side and everything was in full swing! There was a pretty extensive playground area covered in children and the perimeter area was full of people in camping chairs enjoying pizza. We put in our pizza order, grabbed some drinks, and found an area to set up our chairs. The menu offered a pretty wide range of pizzas, several of them available all summer
and several others made of whatever was currently in the garden. They also offered appetizers, again, some available all year and some made special each week. We focused only on pizza and it was nice to be able to choose from two sizes. We also were allowed to do half and half pizzas if the base was the same, so we were able to sample three different styles – the Gyro, Haley’s Comet, and the Garden Goddess.
While we waited we enjoyed the drink selection and the animals. Robin and Bea enjoyed the lilac champagne spritzers, while I had a beer. The dwarf goats were a highlight and a llama hiding behind the building as well. We ate our pizzas against the backdrop of some beautiful rolling hills. We didn’t finish, but we still had some room to purchase S’more kits and ended the night by roasting marshmallows.
We left as dusk settled in and by the time we made it the 20 minutes down to Merrick State Park Island sites, right along the Mississippi, it was totally dark. We sprayed on some bug spray and put up our tent. It was too dark to be sure, but it appeared that we were unusually close to the water. The sounds of boat motors zipping by quite close supported this theory. We were a little late to get firewood, so we stayed in our tent and made up Pizza Farm rating categories and played Mad Libs, before falling asleep. Without the rain fly, we had a great view of the stars and in the morning we had visual confirmation that we were right on the water. The first segment of our trip had turned out a success.
