Road Trip revisited: Day 2!
I’m really want to share my road trip with you guys, so i just don’t care if it’s coming in sporadically.. There’s this mental backlog, that my brain can’t deal with… haha
For a recap, read Days 1+2: (Arrival and Departure)
Otherwise, read on…
July 16 Wisconsin Dells and reaching the Mississippi
The Economy Inn of America really was economy… They served “breakfast”, of individually packaged doughnuts. wow. healthy and delish! /end sarcasm
But it was a reasonable price, all in all. I do wish it was $3 one person though. haha.
So after our terrific breakfast, we hit the road, bypassing Chicago by going through a million toll booths, each of which cost us about 60 cents…
We stopped in Madison, WI for lunch, a quaint little town with waterfront. I remember the University of Guelph having an exchange program there. Kept going after that, until we got out of the city, and started seeing what happens people have too much time on their hands… They start building crazy stuff!!
Beyond the toll booths, and the last vestiges of the city, the landscape slowly changed, with megahighways and lamp posts giving way to the grasses and corn that swayed as cars rolled by.
Wisconsin is famous for its large volume of cheese production, and people there are even sometimes called cheeseheads. So all things considered, I guess it was appropriate for a gas station to construct a 40 ft statue of a farmer dude holding big block ‘o cheese.
Eventually, we arrived at the Wisconsin Dells. I was rather surprised by it, having little expectation of what it would be like. A forested jewel amidst the nearby farmland, it was also one of the biggest tourist traps I’d ever seen. Rollercoasters, waterslides, theme parks, a Ripley’s Believe it or not museum, Ye old time vintage photo studios, all sorts of crap. I wish I had a photo of just how ridiculous it was, and how much visual pollution there was there. The Wisconsin Dells website gives you a taste of what it was like In my mind, all of these human contraptions were simply sullying the beauty of the dells.
It’s places like this that make you realize and appreciate the plodding immensely powerful forces of nature, to be able to carve these kinds of formations, over millennia.
Here Katie (holding Elessar in an adorable carrying case) is in front of Stand Rock (where usually trained dogs perform a flying leap across the chasm onto the rock itself)
After the Dells, we put the pedal to the metal, and drove until we were on the eastern shores of the mighty mississippi river where we stopped for the night, checked into our motel and had a delicious dinner or “four season” pizza (4 flavours for each season), and deep fried ravioli. Then we rested until our next day, which was filled with strangeness and wonder.
oooh … so exciting. finally some new episodes.
Comment by mark — September 28, 2006 @ 7:37 pm