In our quest to drive every major highway in the US in a month, we now find ourselves in Madison, Wisconsin, on day three of our second road trip of the summer. After a calm but exhausting last day of packing on Tuesday, the movers showed up on Wednesday at 8 am, and we moved our strategically-placed cars out of the way to let Tom’s 75 feet of truck park right in front of the house. By 12:30, all of our stuff was in the truck, and Aimee had made the big Salvation Army/cable box return trip, and we were ready to hit the road, via the Pittsford Wegmans for road food bought with all of the change we found in the house.
We’d invited ourselves to stay at Anna and Michael’s place in Ann Arbor, after hanging out with them at Amanda’s wedding in the spring, and they were kind enough to accept our invitation. We’d never been to Ann Arbor, and it was a fine destination for the first night, an easy drive across part of Ontario and around Detroit. We enjoyed their second-floor porch and had a nice late dinner at Madras Masala. We rose the next morning and headed to Battle Creek, home of Kellogg’s Cereal City USA. History, self-promotion, free samples, and Tony the Tiger leading elderly tourists in the macarena made this a memorable stop. After Battle Creek, we continued across Michigan towards the lake.
We got off the main highway near the Indiana border, and drove through the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. I was in search of the 1933 Chicago Exposition Century of Progress homes that had been moved the the dunes area (read a six year old Times article about the future of the houses), and the dunes themselves were great to see, even sandwiched, as they were, between two spewing factories and a nuclear cooling tower. A strange sight, indeed.
After encountering some traffic outside Chicago, we found our way across Illinois to the Quad Cities, and our hotel overlooking the Mississippi in LeClaire, Iowa – crossing the border into Iowa marked 48 states down for me, two left to go. We enjoyed our suite, free with our Holiday Inn Express points accrued on the last road trip, but weren’t quite sure what to do with all of the space. We explored all four of the Quad Cities, from Moline and Rock Island across to Davenport and Bettendorf. The riverboat casinos were about the only things open, and our four dollar limit didn’t get us as far as it did on the last trip.
After rising for our complimentary breakfast this morning, we took off on Highway 67, the Great River Road, along the banks of the Mississippi to Dubuque, where we cut inland to Dyersville to visit the baseball diamond created for the filmin of Field of Dreams 18 years ago. The farmland is actually owned by two groups, leading to two neighboring, competing souvenir shops right next to one another: Field of Dreams Movie Site and Left & Center. The experience itself is quite nice, fairly low-key and pretty striking, out in the middle of nowhere.
We returned to Dubuque for a great lunch and a haircut, as well as a rainy ride on the world’s shortest, steepest train, the Fenelon Place Elevator. We then crossed the Mississippi once again, heading through southwestern Wisconsin towards Madison.
We stopped and marveled at the Dickeyville Grotto and then the Mustard Museum in Mt. Horeb, an amazing collection of mustard memorabilia and over 500 mustards for the tasting (and buying). 
We arrived in Madison by 4:30, and after checking into our hotel, we explored the city, did a little shopping and sightseeing, enjoyed the photobooth at Tex Tubb’s Taco Palace, and had a great dinner at Kabul on State Street. Every time we come to Madison, we leave feeling like it would be a great city to live in. Who knows… Tomorrow brings the Wisconsin Dells and Minneapolis, as we slowly make our way towards Montana.
