Halfway through the trip: Wisconsin and Minnesota

Main Township High School East

Leaving Indiana Dunes on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, we stopped first in the suburbs of Chicago to visit briefly with friends we had met on a trip to the Galapagos a few years ago. While there we drove up to Park Ridge/Des Plaines to see Lew’s childhood homes and then, at my request, to visit his old high school (that he’s never been back to see). What a kick! It was great for me to be able to experience a piece of Lew’s history and a chance for him to do a little reminiscing. 

 

It's tough to be a mom!

Did a little reminiscing with our friends, too, caught up, visited the zoo, had a barbeque, and shared some of our respective travels with one another. We had a good time, especially in the hot tub!

Rub a Dub Dub

Next we were off to Wisconsin to spend some time with an old school chum of mine from Jr/Sr high school. We did a lot of sightseeing while there - a few beautiful hikes, drives through the lush countryside, a visit to a cheese-making dairy farm. We enjoyed the wet, GREEN, mosquito infested hills and valleys of southern Wisconsin. Will and Gail took us to the place where the last glaciers ended their grinding journey south some 12,000 years ago and began to recede, leaving behind a glacial moraine, hills, rivers, lakes, and other interesting geologic formations. Quite beautiful.

Devil's Lake

Last glacier stopped here. Moraine across lake

Great scenery to contemplate

Gail and Will Tetrault and me in green, wet Wisconsin

In between these excursions we found time to meet with a long, lost friend who had been a Swarthmore exchange student at Pomona in 1968 and with Lew’s cousin, David, and his wife. Nice lunches and good conversation both times.

Linda and I haven't changed in 51 years!

We also HAD to visit a couple of very interesting museums, of course. There was the World Famous Mustard Museum – with myriad flavors to sample and purchase, if one was so inclined. Very interesting, and tasty!

 But the museum to end all museums was located just a stone’s throw from our friends’ house – The House on the Rock. This amazing archeological edifice is a museum like nothing you’ve ever seen before with bizarre collections of exotic, unusual, and amazing ”stuff”! All accumulated by one man, there are miniatures of every shape and type,  a huge collection of dolls and doll houses, model airplanes, carousel animals, music machines, suits of armor, antique guns, mechanical banks, a huge organ that takes up a room, and even a recreation of a 19c. street filled with antiques.

Then there's the world’s largest indoor carousel with 20,000 lights, 183 chandeliers, and 269 animals (but no horses – they were decorating the walls and ceiling.) Truly a weird, but wonderful, experience.

 

Putting in the River

But the best part of the week was our 13-mile kayak trip down the Wisconsin River – Gail and I in one kayak, and Lew and Will in the other. It was challenging occasionally, but with the river flowing rapidly, we made good time and had a ball. Scenery was beautiful, with no mosquitos.

Relaxing after a hard paddle

 Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, so we bid farewell to Gail and Will on the following Sunday, and drove on to Minnesota. We spent the first night not far over the border, south of Rochester, MN, near Lanesboro. That afternoon we took a nice bike ride along the Root River and stayed in a lovely RV Park where we could have enjoyed more time if we had it.

Alas, the journey must continue, so the next day we were up early so we could stop in Austin, MN – why Austin, you ask? Well, to see the SPAM Museum, of course.  

Another one of our collection of weird and/or unique museum experiences. It was fun, and, of course, we bought 4 cans, with some exotic flavors!

We then drove on to Albert Lea, where we ditched our RV for a few hours while we detoured to Iowa to take a Winnebago Factory Tour. Very interesting, to go along with the other two tours we had taken earlier in Indiana. Less impressed with their quality, but they do make some smaller ones that we might consider for the future. When we were back on the road in our RV on our way to Minneapolis (some 4 hours later), 9 months almost to the day since we left Anacortes, we passed a milestone, so to speak – or 10,000 miles. We considered that the HALFWAY point of our adventure (9 months, 10,000 miles) (actually we’ve put in a lot more than that if you count the trip to Baja at Christmas in the car and the trip up to Colorado and Utah to ski (again, in the car) in February.) More on that milestone in a later post.

Meanwhile, we set up camp in a KOA northwest of Minneapolis and took care of some housekeeping details – like securing reservations for our trip back to Washington and getting an oil change for the RV. That done, we spent a couple of days enjoying the scenery in the Twin Cities, including visits to the Mill City Museum (I didn’t know that Minneapolis used to be the center of the milling industry) and an outdoor sculpture museum, a walk around the Lake of the Isles and a stop at the University (bringing back some distant memories from 1969/70 when I spent a year as Head Resident of a U of M dorm).

View from top of old mill - note ruins on right.

Sculpture Museum

Iconic picture of sculpture museum and Minneapolis cityscape

Walk around Lake of the Isles

This was the end of the first half of our trip. We drove up to Duluth to spend a few days with Lew’s cousin before leaving the RV in her front yard while we head home to Washington for “summer vacation”. We did manage to enjoy the sights up on the north shore of Lake Superior, however, as Marg gave us the grand tour and we learned about voyageurs, lighthouses, and shipwrecks on the lake, and enjoyed a few good hikes to waterfalls.

Split Rock Lighthouse

High Falls near Grand Portage, MN on border

Cousins of various generations

Gooseberry Falls

Flying Machines, Fancy Cars, and Old RVs. Whata combination!

Bonnie told you that I would tell you about our airplane-related museum visits.  In two days we visited the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Huffman Prairie Flying Field Interpretive Center that described the Wright Brothers work and the Wright Brothers Memorial.  In doing that we traced the earliest serious attempts to actually fly a heavier-than-air machine to hypersonic, almost out-of-the-atmosphere flight.  Mind boggling, yup.  Yes, the Air Force Museum included ballistic missiles and space travel, but that’s not really “flight.”

The Early "Flying" Machine

Wright Memorial

The Wright Brothers started with a dream very early in the twentieth century, then a compulsion, to create a flying machine.  What shape should the wings be?  Well, watch the birds; how do they create lift with their wings?  Oh well, that didn’t work!  We can’t flap that way.  If we create a glider that seems to work, a but, how can we add power, yeah, some kind of engine to create forward propulsion?  Yes, an engine, but what shape should the “propeller” be?  OK, we’re making progress, but how can we control the direction the machine turns, or even goes higher or lower?

National US Air Force Museum

Move from those basic questions to a world at war (what became known as World War I).  How can we, should we, use these flying machines to further the war effort?  At first the War Department thought flying machines were mere toys, but quickly move through mere observation missions to actually dropping bombs from biplanes to the 1940s, war in Europe AGAIN, and DAMN the Japanese just bombed Pearl Harbor.  Companies that had been making automobiles abruptly retooled to make military airplanes (and military trucks and tanks and big and small weapons and c-rations, and ...) and were finding ways to make airplanes fly faster, higher, farther and carry much heavier loads.  That’s the stuff that was on display at the National US Air Force Museum.  In their section on the Cold War period, there was even an EC-121, “Warning Star” (a military adaptation of the Lockeed Super Constellation) the radar plane used by some of my Air Force colleagues.  That’s a lot of airplane history for two days.

1911 Metallurgique

Bonnie also told you that I would comment on our visits to a couple car museums.  First we visited the Auburn-Duesenberg-Cord Museum in Fort Wayne.Never heard of any of these cars?  Yup, they were great cars in their day.  Ancient history?  Not really, but they were fabulous cars; mostly custom made hand-assembled for the wealthy.  Here’s a picture of one of the sports cars of its day;  sporty enuf?  These were exquisite cars, highly polished for museum display.  Serious credit to the folks who lovingly restored these cars.  In a few cases, the museum displayed pictures of the derelict cars before they were restored – ugh, rust buckets!

 

1904 Studebaker Model C

We also visited the Studebaker museum.  The early Studebakers were horse carts with small electric engines.  WAY ahead of their time?  Well maybe, but with the battery technology of the late 19^th century, electric cars could only go very short distances before needing a recharge.  Hmm, we’re still working on that.  So, on to gasoline power.  The big difference was that the Studebaker family tried to make cars that the average customer might be able to afford.  Sadly, they failed to adapt as others moved to less expensive vehicles created on efficient assembly lines.  We’ll have information on the Ford museum in a couple months.

Since we’ve been traveling in a motorhome, we thought it appropriate to visit a Motorhome Museum and three motorhome factories.  First we toured the Fleetwood RV assembly plant.  They provided an excellent tour on their factory floor giving us an up-close picture of how they make RVs.  Since this was our first RV assembly plant tour, we didn’t know what to expect, but we were impressed with the amount of hands-on assembly work involved.  Yes, much is automated, but still a lot of the work is hands-on assembly.  As expected, they wouldn’t allow pictures during the tour.  Apparently they don’t want us to steel the ideas being integrated into their new models.  Fleetwood has transitioned to a larger line of RVs, thirty-five or longer.  While they probably wanted us to buy a new RV, I bought a new latch for our screen door.  It works great. Sorry, no pictures

During a break in the Fleetwood tour, one of our fellow tourists told us about a small RV manufacturer not far away, Phoenix Cruiser RVs.  Since we had talked about moving to a smaller RV, this tour made sense.  These folks have a small, custom assembly operation.  They focus on “downsizing” producing twenty to twenty-seven foot long RVs, staying as versatile as possible within the smaller size.  Could be just my impression, but it seemed that these folks were much more focused on quality control than their larger counterparts.

As we traveled toward Minnesota, we stopped, well detoured, to the Winnebego Assemby plant in Northern Iowa.  Since they are the largest RV manufacturer they gave the least impressive tour – emphasis on the fabrics to be used, but little emphasis on the strength or durability of the materials that comprise the walls and roof of the RV.  Yes, they produce a wide variety of RVs and we were impressed with some of their models.  

Since we hadn’t had enough of motorhomes, we visited the RV/MH Hall of Fame Museum.  Their displays ranged from boxes of camping supplies mounted on the beds of the earliest pickup trucks to the 1960s vintage trailers to some custom (for celebrities) motorhomes. 

We’ve come a long way in the RV world.  Of course, they had a display of the earliest RVs, Conestoga wagons pulled by oxen.  OK, that wouldn’t be a motorhome, and those wagons weren’t actually used for recreation, but they did include all things that a family would carry as they moved from place to place.  Isn’t that what a motorhome is really for?

There’s no way to summarize this description of ways that we have found or invented to get around.  Probably the most impressive was the description of the problems and successes in creating machines that could actually fly.  Somehow I managed to put myself into their shoes, working to solve the problem; thinking, “there has to be a way to make this %#@&*ed thing fly.”  Wow!