This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.
Thursday, August 21
I used Rewards points for our stay in Austin, Minnesota at the AmericInn, a Wyndham brand that I'd never heard of. At a guess, I'd say maybe they started this chain of slightly-nicer motels to try to recover some of the reputational damage they've suffered from their cheapening of several of their other brands over the last dozen years or so; like La Quinta and Days Inn, both of which used to be reliably nice two- or three-star motels, but now are all over the map and are not reliably anything. I could be wrong: like I said, I've never heard of this AmericInn brand before, and this might be the chain's only decent example.
As it is, it was clean and comfortable, and the desk clerk was particularly pleasant.
We went to breakfast at a little cafe across the street from the Hormel plant, where local farmer-types at the next table talked weather the entire time we were there. I learned that Spring Valley, Wisconsin, where my friend Kirby lived, had some kind of heavy-weather event. "Did you hear about Spring Valley?" said one to the others; "That was some kind of rain they had!" I wanted to ask him more about it, but didn't want them to know I'd been eavesdropping.
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| Admit it: you always wondered |
Next came a stop in Decorah, Iowa, at Vesterheim, a Norwegian heritage museum. It takes up most of a city block and includes a four-story museum, a number of old buildings brought on site from other places, and a gift shop and gallery. It told the usual story of immigration to this country: the hardship and lack of opportunity in the Old Country; the success of most immigrants; how some went back, either because they'd saved enough money for the life they wanted back home, or because they'd been disillusioned by the hard life they found here. The Vesterheim ("western home") Foundation has been at this business of preserving and celebrating Norwegian heritage for a long time now, apparently very successfully, but maybe too successfully. To my mind, their heritage center was too clean-cut and packaged; not as down-to-earth as the Norsekedalen heritage center I'd been through a number of years ago, not far away in Wisconsin. (Though that view might only reflect the fact that a friend of mine was our docent at Norskedalen, so we got a lot more gossip on that visit.)
I think we skipped lunch that day. I don't remember stopping for anything to eat, but we did go for ice cream at a little shop down the street from the heritage center, and a little local shop that had all kinds of interesting flavours unfamiliar to me. Sherry had a scoop of Zanzibar chocolate and one of Hunka Hunka Chunka, which had banana and peanut butter and something else in it. I had one of salted caramel with chocolate chunks, and one of a butterscotch and peanut butter mix. They were all really good.
We had no idea how far we'd get on the road toward Milwaukee, so I didn't make a motel reservation at that time. We drove across the Mississippi River into Wisconsin, and down to the Wisconsin River, then took a designated Scenic Drive east along that river. (It was, of course, a beautiful drive.) I finally decided we would get to Sauk City, so when I had a signal I tried to make a reservation there. Couldn't find any motels in that town, so reserved a room in a place called Lodi, some ten or fifteen miles east of that. It was a little hunters' lodge, very basic and very inexpensive, with no amenities to speak of. It also had no wifi signal and no phone service, so I couldn't update this blog or deal with the pressing issue of prescriptions until the next day. We found a late dinner at a local tavern where a volleyball tournament was going on -- all of Lodi was there -- then retired for the night.
Friday, August 22
We couldn't get a signal for Google Maps in the morning on leaving Lodi, so I just had to kind of guess which way to go. My paper map didn't show any of the local roads, but I took a wild guess and headed east on a county road. It wasn't a bad guess. It got us, eventually, to the freeway, although probably 10 or 12 miles further back than a better guess would have done. No matter. It was a pretty drive
We stopped for breakfast at a place called the Pine Cone Restaurant and Bakery, which we'd seen a billboard for. It seems to have undergone some kind of trauma, possibly relating to the road construction that blocked the main entrance; there was no bakery and the restaurant was poorly attended. The food was okay, no better: Sherry's french toast was so bland she actually added syrup to it, something I've never seen her do before; my fried egg sandwich was a little better than that, but my eggs weren't fried hard, as I'd ordered, they were scrambled. I chose not to complain. Also, my sourdough was Texas toast. I chose not to complain about that either. I was distracted at the time by the fact that, for the third time in five years, the cheap plastic register that controls the passenger-side rear window on the convertible had broken, and the window won't go up all the way.
I am not fixing it again. I am giving that car to the British Transportation Museum when I get back home. (I'd started to do that last year, but they didn't have their tax-exempt status in order. Now I've learned that it doesn't matter to me; we won't get any tax savings out of it anyway.) Anyway, I'm really getting too old for the kind of back-road wandering I like to do in it; and I'm just about out of new counties to go to anyway.
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| In Oconomowoc, Wisconsin |
We're thinking of creating a travel game called Chaos Bingo, with cards showing all the things that can go wrong. What prompted this is the discovery that the minivan we reserved for our Condo Week trip was at Dane County Airport, in Madison, not Milwaukee. After several hours of frustration, at an additional cost of about $600, we finally got a big enough vehicle for all the stuff we have: a new GMC Yukon Denali, a Suburban-sized SUV that looks like a Secret Service vehicle. (Nancy: "It'll pass anything but a gas station.") We spent a long, long time trying to figure out how to get Google Maps onto the huge video screen in the car, then drove up to Tamarack Resort in Wisconsin Dells, stopping along the way for an early dinner at an Iowa-based chain of family restaurants on the model of Cracker Barrel. Good service, good food, very relaxing after all that had gone before.
Saturday, August 23
