Motorhome in Motion: 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.