And fun was had by everyone

The day of the family reunion dawned cloudy and windy. They had about 50 plus relatives show up. Dad came from a family of nine. He's only got on living sibling left. that's Aunt Ida in the middle with the sunglasses on. She's 91 years old, Dad is 90. It was pretty great to see all of the first cousins and first cousins once removed and second removed and so on.


Here's Lee and Dad with a couple of his first cousins once removed. We had a good time getting re-acquainted with his relatives.

Madson Farm Visit

Here's a little video about the milking operations. They milk twice a day and rotate 2 shifts of cows through. This is the first shift. It was noisy, stinky and you really have to careful not to stand too close to the back end of the ladies!



They don't hand milk them any more. It is a vacuum type system. The milk travels up through a pipe into the "well" house where it is cooled and stored in a refrigerated tank.

A tanker comes once a day to haul the milk to processing plant.

MOOOOOve out of the way!

Several of Lee's cousins live, own and run a farm. A couple of them run a dairy operation. The recession has affected them too, but they're hanging in there.


This lady is one of the milking cows as you can see from her udders. She is actually getting ready to give birth.

We visited Lee's cousin Natalie Madson who Mom always "Lives out in the country". To be exact she lives on a farm in Oconto, Wisconsin. Actually, her son now lives on and runs the family farm and she and her husband Russ built a nice new house away from the barns, flies and animals.

They have a lot of calves. The brown ones are jerseys and the black and white ones are holsteins.

Jersey are a more energy efficient cow according to Russ. The a smaller, eat less feed and produce just as much milk.

They also have an assortment of other farm critters. These are pygmy goats. Aren't they cute?



I seem to recall my oldest wanting one of these things when we first moved up to Montana.

We visited the milking barn. There are a lot of cows to be milked. They say a cow can produce 10 gallons of milk a day.

That's a lot of feed, hay, poop and maniure!

As we were discussing all of this, one of the cows baptized me!

On the road again

We’re on our way to Wisconsin today for the Henning Family reunion this weekend which will be held in Peshtigo, Wisconsin this Sunday.

I think that Grandma and Grandpa are enjoying their travels.


Us, not so much but it’s a lot better than traveling in a car.


Lee's back has been hurting him for the last couple of days but today it was really pretty bad. Good thing we're at the midway point!