One spot along the Ice Age Trail that I really hoped to visit was the New Glarus brewery in New Glarus. Today's hike would take us past it, but it is 2.5 miles off the trail. And, it doesn't open until 10am but Monticello is only a few miles south.

All this meant that we left our camping spot early, but walked only about a mile to 'downtown' Monticello where we found the M&M's restaurant and had a filling bacon, ham, and toast breakfast. We had a leisurely time since it made no sense getting to the brewery early. At the restaurant, I asked the cook if I could charge my camera while we waited. He said that would be fine and took my charger to plug it in behind the counter. As soon as it touched the socket, there was a big, orange flash and 'pop'. His credit card reader, phone, and other electronics were down. We figured he might have had moisture or grease on his fingers that shorted the socket. My camera wasn't attached yet and the charger was fine so I plugged it into a different socket just fine. Excitement!

The brewery was way off trail, but we reached it just before 10am, went on the short self-guided tour, sampled their six beers, then needed to get back on the trail. Fortunately, Papa Bear met Keith and Isaac and they gave us a lift back to where we had left the trail so we could continue our hike. We also chatted with a couple that were on a motorcycle tour from Nebraska.

The hike all day was hot, humid, and buggy - good job bug suits! The heat and humidity are continuing to rise, contrary to my hope that they'd be slowly tapering off as August waned.
Continuing down the trail, we figured we might need to camp along the trail this night until we found 'Basco' written on the map. Basco is a town consisting, as far as I can tell, of three buildings. One of those buildings is a farmhouse under which a bar has been excavated and named Dot's Tavern. The entrance is a door on the side of the house, leading down steep steps to another door. Pushing hard on this door opens into a subterranean tavern with a 6 foot ceiling. This was my first basement bar experience - it was very interesting. A handful of locals were there on a Monday evening and the bartender's name was 'Gator' - the same name as a bartender we met way back in Ellisville.
The folks worked hard to figure out a place for us to stay and we finally wound up camping across the street in a vacant grassy area so it worked out just fine.