![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
People converge on Spring Green, Wis., for many good reasons: To admire Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces. To hear Shakespeare at American Players Theatre. To see world-class kitsch at House on the Rock.
But what brought me to Spring Green? Free stuff.
Spring Green calls itself "The Birthday Town,'' because people celebrating birthdays can go around to its businesses collecting free loot, like trick-or-treaters. It's like having another holiday, except you're the only one who gets to celebrate it.
In 1862, a poor Norwegian couple and their four small children, including their infant son Thorvald, joined a wave of immigrants to Wisconsin, eventually settling in the coulees of Vernon County.
Vernon County was an interesting place in the 1860s. Only a generation before, Black Hawk and his band had fled through it, hounded by militia. They ran headlong into a slaughter that remains one of the most shameful chapters in U.S. history; today, 11 plaques mark the route, which ended near the town of Victory.
Norwegians poured into the steep, flat-floored valleys that reminded them of home. Italians fished along the Mississippi from a
town they called Genoa.
There's a story behind everything in Spring Green.
Frank Lloyd Wright's story begins in the 1860s, when his unconventional grandparents and their 10 children emigrated from Wales to settle this dramatic valley of the Wisconsin River, which came to be known as "the valley of the God-almighty Joneses.''
The story of Alex Jordan's House on the Rock, atop a limestone spire that overlooks the valley and Wright's beloved home, is rooted in spite. After his father traveled from Madison to show Wright blueprints for a rooming house, and was harshly snubbed, he vowed to get even and "put a Japanese house up out there.''
In Westby, Norwegians take their love of tradition to extreme heights.
The high ridges and deep coulees south of La Crosse drew so many Norwegian immigrants in the 19th century that the area around Westby became known as "America's little Gudbrandsdal,'' after the valley in Norway.
The Norwegians had left their homes, but not their customs. Today, Norwegian flags fly from lampposts, and the visitors center
is a stabbur, a top-heavy wood building used in Norway since the Middle Ages.
In southwest Wisconsin, following the Kickapoo River is a lot like watching a magic act: No matter how closely you pay attention, eventually what you see is going to disappear into thin air.
When it reappears, it will be in a completely different spot, and you'll have no idea how it got there.
"Look, there it is again," said my husband, as we drove Wisconsin 131 through the Kickapoo Valley. "It's meandering like mad."
There's a beautiful pocket of Wisconsin that dairy farmers would have had all to themselves if it hadn't been for a few renegade bicyclists.
In 1967, Wisconsin made a bicycling trail out of an abandoned rail bed that it had devoted to hikers until it saw that most of the users were on bicycles. That trail, the Elroy-Sparta, sparked a national race to convert unused rail beds into trails.
Today, Wisconsin has 1,600 miles of rail trails, still more than any other state, though Michigan and Minnesota keep nipping at its wheels. Of those miles, more than a hundred skirt the edge of coulee country around La Crosse, a dramatic region of high ridges and valleys untouched by glaciers.
