Lake Geneva - Ice and snow sculptures (Feb 5)

There was a Winter Festival a couple of weekends ago in Lake Geneva. Figured it was our chance to go check out some ice and snow sculptures!  It was a fairly easy drive actually - straight north and then left on Main Street.  That's it!  It took us less than an hour to get there, although there was a lot of traffic on Main Street.  We decided to stay overnight at a hotel near town so that in itself was a great idea because parking would have been a challenge.  And we know how Daddy is with looking for parking spots. Ha! :-P

O... M... Goodness!  Hovercrafts on ice!

And there's a truck on the ice too!

The snow sculptures are amazing!

This one is too cute, so is Graham :-)

By the way, Graham left his snow boots and jacket at home.  Thankfully, Daddy brought an extra set of shoes and Charlie had an extra jacket in the car.  This kid I tell you.  But if anything, I couldn't believe he could actually fit into Bobby's shoes!  Are his feet already getting that big??! 

There was a statue in among all the snow sculptures.  The plaque says it's a statue of an Andy Gump.  This area was roped off so I couldn't get close to see the inscription.  But, thanks to the internet - seems that Andy Gump was the lead character of a comic strip "The Gumps", created by Sidney Smith in 1917. The comic ran for 42 years in the Chicago Tribune and as the papers were so pleased with its success - they had a statue made of Gump and placed on the creator's property. When Smith passed, the statue was moved to the downtown park and here it is!

Actually, the original statue was destroyed during a drunken riot in 1967, but was replaced. And crazy enough, the replacement was also stolen in 1989 and then also replaced.  Even the historical marker plaque was stolen but it turned up later.  Can't make this up... too funny!

There are SOOOO many people here!  Trying to squeeze in a we-fie:

I wonder how long it took to make all these sculptures.  It probably would have been more fun to show up while they were carving these snow sculptures.  Note to self for next year, perhaps!

There were also some ice sculptures.  This one is of a clown.  Amazing how they do this!

We walked a little further down and woah, a giant coral snow sculpture with turtles and fish.  So cool!

The boys, especially Charlie wanted to go check out the ice fisherman, so off we went.  But there's always some sort of fooling around on the way.  Here, Graham is planning to drop a sheet of snow/ice on Charlie's most vulnerable body part.  Boys, I tell you!

We found some fisherman and look, one of them have caught a fish!  

We were intrigued with all his sonar and other gear, including his jacket that floats.  I don't even want to know how much that would cost??!  Okay, $200 - not too much considering it might save your life if you fell through the ice.

This lake is massive!  And we were told that we were just in the bay:

Here's a hovercraft going by.  Looks like fun! Maybe next time:

Graham really loved this truck! 

We stayed at a hotel next to the historic Baker House.  It's so cute! 

I tried to make a reservation for brunch the next day, but it was fully booked. Boooo!!

It's quite the view from our balcony:

This town is so busy!  We wanted to go to a couple of restaurants along the lake but there were no reservation systems for them and the wait would have been over an hour. Sheesh!  So we opted for a Thai place which we were able to get in early.  And even so, it was packed!

Graham and Charlie love these bottled Japanese soda drinks.  It has this glass marble that you have to push down into the top portion of the bottle before drinking. Not sure what's the science behind it but basically, the marble is used as a cap to maintain the fizziness. If you ask me, every drink is pretty much just sugar water. When we lived in CA, we would actually see the vehicle that was driven by this distributer. I'm not sure if it's because of that vehicle or this glass marble that intrigues Graham and Charlie.  Well, either way, I hope they will learn to control their sugar intake when they are older! 

And come to find out, there is a map for all the ice sculptures!  Most of the businesses in town sponsored an ice sculpture.  Neat!

How do they make the ice with the white color vs clear?

And this one is neither - sort of in between - not clear and not really solid white??!

Awww, my two lovey boys :-P

There's so many cute shops in town.  Graham was eyeing these sunglasses:

He liked them because it fit over his glasses.  He was tempted to go back and buy them the next day, but he actually questioned himself: "When would I wear them?"  And that was that. We didn't go back to the store the next day. I'm glad he is learning!

How cool is this ice-sculptured candle! It probably weighs quite a bit too:

We circled back around town, back to where the snow sculptures were.  Less people now that it's dark. This sculpture won first place. WOAH!! Impressive!!

The next day... we went to get breakfast in town and went into another store.  I'm such a sucker for fingerless gloves:

 I took a photo of them - thinking I would try and make it.  But nah, I went ahead and just bought them. Thank you, honey for the early Valentine's gift :-)

And we were in the ice cream shop last night and less than 24 hours later, we are back in it after breakfast.  Ha ha!

Happy kids!!  What is it about ice cream that make kids so happy??!  I wonder if there's a thesis about this somewhere??

Lobster!  Too bad I couldn't eat this one or take it home.  Ha ha!  There are so many restaurants to try out here. We will have to come back again on a less busy weekend:

And at least the drive home won't be 1.5 hours like trying to get out of downtown Chicago.  Sheesh!

On the way back to the room, we decided to look into the Baker House:

It wasn't too busy, so the maître d' let us wander around a bit inside the hotel. Although, wait... why couldn't I book this place for brunch then??!

Anyway, right off the bat, there's lots of old wood and stained glass:

Maybe we can do something like this to our fire place.  Love these tiles:

Check out this fireplace and it's massive mantel!!

The Baker House was built in 1885 as a summer residence for a Mrs. Robert Hall Baker.  It's 17,000 sq ft and has 30 rooms.  Yikes! That's a lot of rooms!!

We obviously didn't see any of the rooms since there were guests, but we did get a chance to check out this "ice bar" outside.  This entire bar is made out of ice!

What a short but sweet, fun trip to Lake Geneva!  Definitely a must-come-back-to destination for us :-D