We are in our 9th week of travel and heading east across the midwest. There are a lot of miles to cover until we get home. RV travel is more fatiguing than car travel. Unlike traveling by car, RV travel involves a lot of set-up and break down with every change of camp. One has to be careful to ensure that electrical, water and sewer lines are disconnected and properly stowed. Holding tanks need to be emptied. Interior doors need to be closed and secured or their contents will spill out at the first hard turn. The laptop I am using to type this post has fallen out of a cabinet twice because we left a cabinet door unlocked.

To compensate for the extra fatigue, we try to keep our drive times under 5 hours per day. What this means is we sometimes stay in or near small towns that we would not ordinarily plan to visit because we reached our drive-time limit. That’s how we found ourselves eating lunch in a municipal park in Baraboo, Wisconsin, waiting for check-in time to arrive at neighboring Devils Lake State Park.

While we ate lunch in our rig we noticed a trail along the Baraboo River and decided to take a walk. The trail took us to within a few blocks from the center of town so we decided to explore the downtown area and that is how we discovered we were in a place affectionately known as “Circus Town”.

The Ringling Brothers (Al, Aft, Charles, Otto and John) produced their first circus performance in Baraboo on May 19, 1884. The Circus’s winter quarters were located along the Baraboo River. Other Circuses, including one run by the Gollmar brothers, cousin’s of the Ringing brothers, were also originally run out of Baraboo.

The town is chock full remembrances to the town’s circus past.

These two lion sculptures outside of the Baraboo Civic Center provide an obvious nod to the town’s circus history and are remarkable in their own right.

Accidentally finding unexpected historical significance in a small town that we had never heard of before was a sweet treat. Speaking of sweet treats, the ice cream in the Tin Roof Dairy on Third Avenue in Baraboo was also great ;).

Thank you for reading. We appreciate your interest.