My wife, our two daughters and I made our annual summer pilgrimage to her parents' home in Wisconsin's Northwoods.

It's a sacred place, Horseshoe Lake, so remote that the Witness Protection Program couldn't find it. You must drive about 90 minutes northwest from Green Bay, through the Menominee Indian reservation and past a score of potato farms. It's about 20 miles beyond the little town my wife grew up in (think Mayberry with a Midwestern accent.)

Dean and Polly now live year-round in what was once their summer cottage, refurbished to suit them and the visits of their six children and 12 grandchildren, scattered from here to Brisbane, Australia. The lake property has been in the family since Dean's father bought it during the Depression. Only about six houses are scattered around the water, and the noisiest neighbors are a family of three loons straight out of "On Golden Pond.''

Horseshoe Lake is into its fourth generation of swimming, fishing, reading, canoeing, paddle-boating, shooting hoops, playing ping-pong with a cousin, jumping on the trampoline with a sister, catching frogs with your 8-year-old daughter (and own inner child), taking long morning walks on the old logging trails (did you see the fox?), watching old movies after dinner -- it's better than a resort. There's no tipping.

I couldn't have asked for better in-laws and our girls couldn't ask for better grandparents. And yet. And yet.

My father-in-law sure has a funny way of watching a ballgame.

You should understand first that the Cheeseheads of Wisconsin are as mad for sports as Western Pennsylvanians are. Coverage of Brett Favre's dance with the Green Bay Packers is overdone everywhere, but in Wisconsin it's fried crispier than the funnel cakes at the Langlade County Fair.

Quick example of the all-Favre-all-the-time nature of this Wisconsin summer: One morning I drove down to the convenience store everyone calls "And Linda's.'' (It used to be "Dale and Linda's,'' but they broke up.) It's your go-to place for live bait, fireworks, hard liquor and gasoline, but I needed only milk and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Anyway, I made the short walk from there to the post office to buy stamps. Atop the counter was a photo of a toddler holding a rattle, only somebody had superimposed Favre's big head on the kid with the caption: "I wanna play!"

Rarely have I been more pleased with a federal facility.

As here, baseball long has taken a back seat to football in Wisconsin, but this summer the Brewers are in a pennant race with the Chicago Cubs just down Interstate 94. So Miller Park filled with fans from both cities last week for a four-game series, and Dean and I sat before his TV to watch.

That's when I learned of my father-in-law's, ahem, unique way of watching baseball.

Dean can't stand the TV announcers, and so he mutes the set and listens to Bob Uecker call the game on the radio.

That might not sound so bad. Mr. Uecker is a funny guy, and is as much fun doing a ballgame as he was doing the Miller Lite commercials, and way more fun than he was in "Mr. Belvedere.''

Trouble is the radio is seven seconds ahead of the TV. Which means I knew how every play would go before any batter on the screen swung. It was like watching a movie with the person next to you revealing every last plot twist in advance. I had to turn my chair away and treat the TV as a replay service.

I was not the first son-in-law to complain, and after the first game, Dean relented and just went without sound altogether -- and the Brewers lost four straight.

He went back to his old habit after that, the Brewers won two straight from the Braves, and he explained that they only won when he listened on the radio. Who was I to argue?

This is the same man who told me, correctly, that when a man's wife says she'll be ready in two minutes, the time can drag longer than the last two minutes of a football game.

Just before I left Wisconsin, I stepped barefoot on a bee. It doesn't hurt, but it itches and, every time I scratch it, I think of my wife and kids still up there for another week -- and Bob Uecker. Then I smile and reach for the clicker.