Reflections: strangers on a stranger journey.

There sure is a lot to reflect on here, maybe enough for two entries. I’ll just try to go in some sort of logical progression about things we learned, and things we would do differently, and where we might go next.

The most obvious things are stuff like route, time and accommodations. Although our route was boring on occasion, we (well, mostly I) selected it, and parts of it, for particular reasons. There were people or places we wanted to see, so we went there. What I learned about the upper and central Midwest is, except for certain individual locations, which may be very spread out, there’s not a lot to see or do of the kinds of things we like. We did the Ingalls-Wilder stops because we were up that way anyhow. I doubt I would make that sort of trip again because now we have seen it and now we know. We’re really glad we saw the thirteen states we went through, because we just hadn’t seen some of them at all, and now we have, and we wanted to know what was out there. Joyce has five states left to see, which will largely determine where we go next.

We certainly did the right thing by avoiding cities. We only went into Memphis and Chattanooga, and Memphis wasn’t worth it. We are not interested in “nightlife” or “entertainment” or drinking ourselves into oblivion. We hate traffic, noise, dirt and crowds. These things don’t excite us a bit. Except for airports and necessary evils like finding the VA, I doubt we’ll ever deliberately tour a city again, at least, not in North America. Europe is an entirely different story, but it is so easy to travel there, we will probably delay returning there until our late 70s, because anyone can do Europe. We’ll save what’s left of our youth and strength for the more adventurous kinds of travel we prefer at the moment.

As to the time spent, seven weeks is too much, at least of that type of travel. We’ve decided to limit ourselves to six next time, and see how that goes. A lot of the strain of travel had to do with accommodations, and now we have learned a lot more about those. You know, we’ve been traveling for decades, but that doesn’t mean we know it all, because many things have changed in recent years that make road tripping harder than it used to be, and one of them is mean people. So we now know some things to do to avoid them.

Regarding accommodations, we would pay more for a better quality of service. We would scrupulously avoid certain chains, and deliberately seek out others. We wanted to use La Quinta as exclusively as possible, but they aren’t in all the places we wanted to be. So we learned which chains to avoid, and which are a suitable substitute. The best for traveling with animals is La Quinta. Americinn is the most quiet and probably the most attractive. Holiday Inn Express is the most luxurious. And Belmont is second in all categories. We’re sending them all letters of appreciation with a few suggestions on how to become ideal.

That’s enough for one entry. Watch for another one soon.

Hastings-on-Vermillion

Another why are we here? location. It’s on the way to Wisconsin Dells by way of another Laura Ingalls Wilder site. It was either that, or see more of the same interstate again. So we got (way) off the beaten path to get here. And it’s not at all bad, either!

It took us almost no time to get over here from Mankato, and it was a beautiful day, so we took the kids to a park with a waterfall.







We had a nice walk, went back to the hotel, and had a lovely swim, followed by a nice dinner in a restaurant close enough to walk to. Next day was our planned day-trip to Pepin, Wisconsin, right across the Mississippi River. (The Vermillion is a tributary.)

So that’s what we did the next day, and it was right along the Mississippi on a secondary road that is also some sort of historic steamboat trail with lots of pullouts and scenery, and weird little artist colonies.





It’s all very pretty, but deceptive. That far north, they only have four months of livable weather. Lots of cute little vacation cottages that you can’t leave for eight frozen months a year. But we were there during that little window, so we enjoyed it.

What I didn’t know was that Joyce was having trouble saying awake. At this point, we’d been on the road over a month, and we were both starting to get worn out. Even with the extra days off built into our schedule, or forced upon us by nature, we were running out of energy. But we still had a good time visiting the official birthplace and getting more books and looking at views of the river. It was a really nice day.

Slow slog to Mankato and the Restaurant Gauntlet

But we couldn’t dilly-dally around the Corn Palace for long, because Mankato, Minnesota, beckoned. Well, not so much Mankato, but Walnut Grove, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived on the banks of Plum Creek. It took us so long to get there on the back roads that we really only had time to snap a few pics and buy a few books. If not for this site, there would be pretty much no town at all.





She didn’t live IN the town anyway, but in a dugout a couple of miles from it and there’s nothing left of that. From this location, they were driven out by locusts and had to move to Burr Oak, Iowa, to recover, a stop not on their original itinerary, or ours.

We continued to Mankato and got in late which did not make Joyce at all happy. Too long a day. Ordered delivery food, almost always a mistake. Swam after brief discussion with desk clerk. Adult hours begin at 10 PM, kids still in pool, and not quiet kids, either. They complained they had just arrived. Too bad. Adults get two hours, they get 14. Arrive earlier. Enough already with the child-worship.

Mankato was where I got the nerve pinch in my hand. Luckily we had an extra day so we stayed there while I worked that out. Late in the afternoon, or early evening, we decided to go out to eat. Mankato is a college town with a lot of little eateries, and we were just off-campus, so we thought this would be easy enough.

We shouldn’t think. That’s all there is to it. We first drove to a Green Mill restaurant where the host was on the phone when we walked in, and ignored us completely. When a server came up front for something, we asked him about being seated, and he said we’d have to wait because they were understaffed. All right in front of this other guy. So we left. Obviously they weren’t interested in us, so we quickly lost interest in them. We drove to a row of other restaurants and parked, and immediately we saw two dogs in a black car with the windows all the way up, and the sun was out! A dog can fry in less than five minutes in a locked car.

I pulled out my cell phone, but I had no service, so we ran into the closest restaurant to call the police from there. It was a Thai place where you give your order at the counter and they call your number. We asked the woman ahead of us in line to call the police, and right there in front of her daughter, she dithered and couldn’t bring herself to make a decision. She didn’t know the right thing to do, and how to do it, and she demonstrated that to her child. This is why kids don’t learn how to act responsibly and appropriately: their parents have no clue, either.

We then asked the counter-worker to do it, and that was when the man at the front of the line admitted the dogs were his. So we surrounded him and told him to get out and unlock that car or we would call the police or we would put a rock through his window. He argued and she kept trying to get his order but we just kept at him until he went out. And he kept protesting it wasn’t hot and we said we’d see if the police had a thermometer. Anyway, he got the windows down and we waited until he went back for his order and drove away.

That was very difficult for us, and very upsetting, and because the Thai restaurant worker wouldn’t do the right thing, we walked to another place, but it was also do-it-yourself and we were no longer interested. We wanted to sit down someplace decent, so we got back in the car and started driving until we found a Mexican place that turned out to be real nice.

So beware. Joyce may not stand up for her own rights, but she will defend a dog to the death. And if you see animals in distress, stand up and help them. Rescue them, unless you can live with killing apathy.

On the Great Plains: Beauty and the Blast Furnace

There's going to be some overlap of yesterday's impressions with today's.

On our way north, out of Iowa, we saw our first wind farms. Joyce took tons of pictures. Lots more wind farms throughout the rest of yesterday's drive.



Many charming and well-kept farms, more and more beautiful countryside bursting into bloom.





So many flowers, mating (and apparently suicidal with lust as well) red-winged blackbirds, pheasants, geese and ducks in a hundred little blue ponds.

Turned left in Minnesota, which was a little dull and flat at first but then became almost as pretty as Iowa. Crossed the state line into South Dakota, and just couldn't believe how pretty it was! We didn't go far; just to Sioux Falls, where we had a two-day stop in puruit of Laura Ingalls Wilder and family.

Although we were freezing when we got up in the morning, within four hours of leaving Clear Lake: blast furnace! temperatures in the 90s! baked dogs! Okay, so that last one is a slight exaggeration, but it could happen if you weren't paying attention to the heat on the cement in the sun.

Drove north and west to De Smet, which the locals pronunce "duh-SMETT." This kind of thing drives me nuts. The correct pronunciation is "Dismay" as in the original name of the original French priest for whom it was named. Even the original settlers pronounced it "Dismay" and if you've read The Long Winter you can easily see why. Are Americans collectively such ignorant boobs that we have to have everything dumbed down for us? Can we not learn at least one more language that isn't a computer programming language? Can we stop expecting the whole world to conform to us? We are not the international cultural standard. Grow up, people. Open a book. Learn a thing or two from a source other than Entertainment Tonight.

Anyhow, because we like the Great Plains so much, it was no surprise that we enjoyed the Ingalls-Wilder homestead, and the town, too. One thing I learned is that all the pretty copses and groves weren't there when the Ingalls arrived. Almost every tree was planted by individual farmers or government programs. So it wasn't pretty then, or easy, or any romantic thing. Those PBS shows on frontier and pioneer life are pretty accurate. It was hard. We should have learned something from the native Americans who preceeded us, and left things as they were. The dogs loved the homestead, too, with all the animals and holes in the ground and interesting smells, but then, they are animals, and this land belonged to animals first.





On the return from De Smet, the weather turned really hot and windy again. It was really unbearable, and was another reason homesteding must have been so hard. We headed for the pool and didn't go out again until the sun was down. Next day: off to Wall, a 300-mile leg.