The weather promises to be beautiful this weekend. How about a short trip to the north?

My sister and I recently took a little jaunt to West Bend. Our mission was to visit the Museum of Wisconsin Art and hopefully do a little digging into some background information on Wisconsin artist Francesco Spicuzza.

Our grandfather was a friend of the artist. We did not find what we were looking for that day...must dig deeper!

The museum features Wisconsin artists. Their main collection is of Carl Von Marr's work. He painted in the late 1800s and his work is quite remarkable. I love his use of light in his paintings, and his people have a real sense of life to them. If you are in the West Bend area, the collection is worth seeing.  

The museum is located at 300 S. 6th Ave. (6th and Poplar St.)There are some playful frogs sitting on a bench on the north side--be sure to take a picture with them.

Museum Hours: Wed. - Sat. 10 am - 4:30 pm, Sunday 1 - 4:30 pm. They are closed on holidays. 

Just a half block east of the museum on Poplar Street is a restaurant, the Poplar Inn, 518 Poplar Street, 262-335-6302. It is in an old brick house and it was very charming.

We had a delicious lunch there--price range was from $5 - $11, I think. The menu offered sandwiches, salads, soups, and great desserts. We shared a chocolate gannache dessert after our lunch. Very tasty, especially when paired with the Alterra coffee they served.

The restaurant decor featured antiques and faux painting. There was a bar upstairs, but we did not venture up there.

Even the ladies room was decorated in a clever way. They used an old copper wash tub and wringer to hold folded sage green fingertip towels!

By the way, this was not a ladies only type place--there was an extended family there and also another table with a married couple in addition to a few tables of women when we first arrived.

I got the sense this was a place visited by the locals. I like supporting good restaurants that are not part of a chain.

Our next notable stop was a very cute shop called Somedays: simple luxuries for life at 305 W. Kilbourn, 262-334-3480.

If you leave the Poplar Inn and walk east, you will run into it (where Poplar meets Kilbourn and South Main.)

The owner, Kim Hahn, was a former teacher and we quickly were chatting about this and that.

I enjoyed the way she displayed her inventory; Kim did it in a very artistic way. I really didn't need anything, but a tiny 6 inch old fashioned wire hanger with hanging clips somehow popped into my hand. It was only $2.50, but what could I use it for?

Ah, I know! I could hang vintage postcards from it as a unique way to display them on the wall instead of using a frame. Sold!

Now for the fun part. Kim gave my little purchase all the attention a $100 purchase would have commanded! She gave me the full treatment: printed tissue, mini shopping bag, tag, and ribbon bow!

My sister and I continued looking in various shops on South Main, but we did not find any as fetching as Kim's Somedays.

Ah, time to head home. It was a pleasant way to spend the day. Let me know if you have a favorite shop or restaurant in West Bend. We might have to go back for more "research."

Post Script: Kim from Somedays emailed me with this restaurant suggestion: Cafe Soeurette. It is located at 111 N. Main Street. 262-338-2233 She recommended giving them a call first, because their hours vary.

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We rekindled our love affair with road trip vacations in 2001 when our son was finally old enough to endure 3 days of driving at a time, and we were able to afford more dependable transportation. Instead of our usual 2 hour drive to some favorite State Park for 2 weeks of camping, we graduated to visiting various National Parks out west. It has been great.

Because of our road trip habit, I've payed attention to gas prices. Beginning in 2001, when prices spiked in late spring, I would wring my hands with everyone else and worry how high they would go by August (the time of our departure.) But it seemed every year, gas prices went down about 40 - 50 cents/gal by the time we hit the road. (Good reason to plan your driving vacation late in the summer.) Photo shows $3.79/gal on July 25, 2008 at Speedway on Greenfield and Sunny Slope Road, that is about .50 cents lower than earlier highs this summer. 

Experience taught me to not fret too much about what would prices be by the end of summer? I would assure myself the price would come down later in the summer, and they did. Unfortunately, the lower price of August was usually .25 to .50 cents/gal higher than the year before! 

I checked my travel journal for some past August price examples*. You can see the prices increases nearly every year:  2003 - $1.59/gal, 2004 - $1.83 to $1.93/gal, 2005 - $2.53 to $3.47/gal (California' price), 2006 - $2.99 to $3.19/gal, 2007 - $2.85 - $3.09. Notice the prices in 2007 were cheaper than 2006, but that was the exception to the norm.

The AAA agent told me Monday, the price this summer is $1.19 higher (nationwide) than last year's gas prices. That is a higher jump from years past. Some other market forces are at work.

USA Today attributed the oil prices drop to fewer miles driven in, Cost at pump dips as demand, oil prices fall,

Drivers in the USA logged 9.6 billion fewer miles in May than in May 2007, the government reported Monday. It was the third-largest monthly drop in 66 years.

But to me, that alone cannot account for the downturn in oil prices. If you look at the graph to the left, you see that oil prices started declining more steadily around the time the President announced he was removing the moratorium on offshore drilling. I believe if the Congress would approve domestic drilling, we would see more declines. 

If you look at the chart from this 2nd article, US drivers Log 9.6 B fewer miles in May, you see that Americans have been driving significantly less all year. May did not even mark the largest downturn, March did. If the price of oil was so dependent on driving alone, March's decline should have triggered a crude oil price reduction, shouldn't it have?

The data released Monday show that Americans drove 29.8 billion fewer miles in the first five months of this year compared with the same period last year, a 2.4% drop. The dip continues a seven-month trend beginning in November. Americans have driven 40.5 billion fewer miles from November through May compared with the same period a year earlier.

I believe we must start drilling in America if we want to see oil prices really decline. (Domestic drilling would also keep  billions of US $ at home, but that is another subject!) We are on a hair trigger as it stands now, where any natural or man-made disaster could push prices up. 

Unrest in non-OPEC countries, such as Nigeria, could push prices higher. Militants in that country sabotaged two oil pipelines Monday, driving crude prices for September delivery up $1.47 a barrel. A major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico also could send oil prices higher.

"We could always have a spike to $150 a barrel," Smith says.

For right now, we can relax just a tiny bit and enjoy the typical price decrease of .40 to .50 cents/gallon in August. Too bad it is still .70 cents a gallon more ($1.19 nationwide) than last year!

*In 1979 gas prices were under 50 cents a gallon in the early summer! (Good thing.This was our 5 1/2 week, 8,000 mile Way Out West camping trip.)

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