One of my favorite fast food chains is the Culver's. Predictably, Patrick was the one who introduced me to this Wisconsin-based chain. I don't remember exactly when, but ever since I've been a big fun of Culver's, especially when I'm on a road trip in areas with questionable meal choices. Granted, it's always an extra fun to accidentally find a good local restaurant when in an unfamiliar place, but it's also true that a failure could be quite miserable when you're tired of driving, hungry, grumpy with your companion, or all of the above. Then, the blue metal roof of Culver's comes in sight, and you (and your similarly hungry companion) are saved. I don't know if I would eat there more often if there were Culver's closer to home, but our trip north often involves one meal at one of their restaurants.

We (Patrick, my mom and I) ended up in one of the many Culver's after our antique hunt in Volo Antique Mall. To be precise, we didn't go there right after the Mall--we stopped at the nearby Moraine Hills State Park and took a leisurely bird walk along one of their awesome trails. The "Yellow Trail" was fantastic. The first part of the 2-mile loop meanders through a marshland, which offers plenty of wildlife sitings. Despite the fact that we were there around 2 pm (which isn't the ideal birding time), we saw close to twenty different species. About half of them we didn't recognize. Among the ones we did know, the highlight of the first few was a pair of red headed woodpeckers. Unlike other woodpeckers with a black-and-white speckled back and a poorly defined red patch on the head, red headed woodpeckers are Mondorian-like in their boldly defined color sections. Just below the dead tree where the two flew around, a smallish beaver made an awesome racket, going after his potential lunch in muddy water. Beside him was an inscrutable-looking green frog, seemingly oblivious of the commotion just three feet from him. Though the evidence of drought was visible in the marshland (dried-up canals, dead fish floating belly-up in shallow water, etc.), it still seemed to sustain an amazing number and diversity of wildlife. We even saw a school of tiny catfish--black and jelly-like, but shaped just like their grown-ups, complete with the whiskers and all!

The marshland is taken over by a forest, then runs through a large prairie. The prairie was literally run over by busy American gold finches. A few Indigo buntings perched on the top ends of bushes. The summer wildflowers were everywhere, with gorgeous butterflies sucking their nectar here and there. Butterflies were an annoyance for me (I'm terrified of them), but Patrick was visibly delighted. Then, we were in the forest again, this time infested with mosquitoes--and dozens of birds as well. A scarlet tanager boasted its beautiful scarlet, while tiny, hummingbird-sized gnatcatches jumped from one branch to the other, like busy bees. Had it not been for the mosquitoes, we could have stayed there all day long, staring at the tree tops, open-mouthed and sore-necked.

The last attraction just before the trail came to a complete loop was a common yellow throat, a kind of yellow warbler with a black bandit mask. The sinister mask seemed utterly and amusingly unfit for a tiny bird (about 5 inches at the most) with a slim, smart shape and a beautiful song. As we approached the parking lot by the McHenry Dam, an appetizing smell of riverside BBQ wafted through the pine forest, and we realized that we were starving. Our pace naturally picked up, and within a few minutes, we were back in the car and headed north to 120, where we'd seen a Culver's on the way.

From their wide selection of menu items, my mom chose an Atlantic cod dinner, Patrick got a pulled BBQ pork sandwich, and I settled on their signature Butter Burger. The BBQ pork was surprisingly good for a non-BBQ joint, and my mom's battered cod was excellent: firm and flavorful, it might be comparable to the fish and chips at (dearly missed) Marshall Field's. And just for the record, the cod dinner came with an extraordinary amount of food: two 6-7 inch-sized pieces of fried cod, a mountain of French fries (that covered more than half the 10-inch plate), a decent-sized cole slow and a large cup of green beans. (I think the server made a mistake; the dinner was supposed to come with either the green beans or the slow, not both.) That was a lot of food. My Butter Burger was okay--for some reason, I always end up getting the Butter Burger even though every time I do so I realize that other items taste better.

After all that grease-packed meal, a nutritionist-approved decision would be to leave the premises immediately (and never come back again). But who would leave a Culver's without getting the frozen custard? Not us. I didn't want a ton of it, but I did want a few spoonfuls of the creamy, sweet dessert. We decided to share a small (what good boys we were!) caramel cashew sundae. The cold custard and the hot, gooey caramel; the sweetness of the caramel and the salt on the nutty cashew; it was a divine concoction of matching and fighting opposites. "Didn't we get the same thing when we went to Culver's in Port Washington?" asked my mom, and she was right. I'm hooked to that one. Now finally satiated, we left the premise--but, to the dismay of our imaginary nutritionist, only to come back again sometime later during one of our next trips up North.

Who would want to resist the temptation?