One with the Road

Today was another long mileage day of driving, making our way across Nebraska and up into the southwest corner of South Dakota to Hot Springs. While we were somewhat concerned that today might drag out like the second half of Iowa did yesterday, it turned out that Nebraska was a blast…..but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Leaving in the morning from Sioux City, IA there was some concern about severe weather conditions as a tornado was spotted the day before - right outside one of the towns that we had to drive through (Valentine, NE). Fortunately, today’s more severe weather was moving east towards our path and wasn’t expected to get unstable until later in the day. Therefore, we made a point of getting started relatively early and just drove at the system, beating it to the punch. The strategy worked well, and while we saw some periods of decent rain, they were relatively isolated and short. By about 2:00pm, not a cloud was in sight.

Our first stop was at the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Park. This is a dig site where some American Rhinos, prior to extinction about 12 million years ago got trapped, in place, at their watering hole by a huge “storm” of volvanic ash. Pretty cool!

Like many of the places we have visited already, while at the Ashfall site, we met a nice family of folks from another area of Nebraska. Hello to Harlan, Donna and Sonya…we hope you enjoyed your visit to the site and made it back home safely!

From Ashfall, we headed out back onto US-20 and made our way to Ainsworth, NE for lunch at the “world famous” Big John’s Cafe. This place was a fairly rustic dive kind of place, but the burgers were good.

Once clearing Ainsworth and Valentine, the terrain opened up and what proceeded was some true desolate isolation from the rest of the world and some really good driving roads. To be clear, some really good Corvette driving roads with a good road surface, good hills, good turns, good visibility, great scenery and virtually nobody anywhere to be seen. This part of the drive was a total blast and just about as much fun as one can expect with their clothes on.

How fast did we go? We didn’t really keep close track, but we did happen to cross between central and mountain time zones during this particular part of the drive and were able to complete about 80 miles of driving arriving WELL before the time we left….

Sorry to all the insects that did have to give their lives during the making of this production.

From our new base here in Hot Springs, SD we have all day tomorrow to make the 100 mile journey to Deadwood, SD with planned stops at Crazy Horse, Mt Rushmore, and the scenic Iron Mountain Road drive.

Today was another perfect weather day for a road trip. We shot up I-90 from Elgin, IL to Rockford before switching to US-20 to make our way over to Iowa via Galena. Turns out that Galena is the original home of Ulysses S. Grant. We didn’t stop to see his home, as the area was packed with July 4th weekenders, but it looked like a really nice town to visit again sometime. One thing we did notice in this area is that the country side leading into and out of Galena looked very much like home (ie: Upstate New York).

The picture above could easily be Bristol, NY. Anyway, after getting through Galena and continuing to follow US-20, we moved into Iowa by crossing the Mississippi River at Dubuque, IA.

The funny thing about Iowa is once you get into the state a few miles, you basically never have to use your turn signals again. The road is straight as an arrow, amazingly flat and all you can see are three things:

• Corn
• Soy Beans
• The Horizon

This is actually pretty cool and zen like….as in “One with the Road”….for about an hour or two. The problem is, the state is about 4 to 5 hours wide. So, you start looking for things to keep your mind occupied. Sudoku puzzles anyone!?……

(See the corn going by in the background while Jeff is driving!?)

One neat thing we did see along the way was a large crop of Wind Mills for generating power. These were not your garden variety ones, but the megawatt sized ones and they went off towards the horizon as far as you could see….and in Iowa that is a LONG way. We’re guessing there must have been hundreds of them.

We stopped in Fort Dodge, IA for a late lunch/early dinner at a local place named the Mineral City Mill and Grill for some very tasty sandwiches which was our only real stop in Iowa before ending the day in Sioux City just short of the Nebraska border.

Tomorrow we head to Hot Springs, SD via northern Nebraska (another pretty long day) to get into position for our visit to Mount Rushmore on Monday.

Footnotes:

• We had intended to stop in Dyersville, IA to see the Field of Dreams baseball stadium, but we missed the turn and didn’t realize it until it was too late to go back….I guess we should have put that one into the GPS
• Mom, I was not really driving and doing Sudoku puzzles at the same time.
• No corn or soy beans were harmed during the making of this production

Unlike yesterday, today the weather was great! – A perfect day for driving and exploring the Indiana country side.

We started out the day after sleeping in a bit and headed from Perrysburg, OH into the city of Toledo itself for an early lunch at Tony Packo’s Cafe. This place, if you are not familiar, was made famous by the character Corporal Max Klinger on the TV series M*A*S*H. The featured items on the menu are “Hungarian Hot Dogs” and various derivatives of things you can make by pouring a very tasty chili over pretty much anything. Albeit somewhat decadent, the food was quite good. The hot dogs reminded us of the “Coneys” at Skyline Chili available in the the Cincinnati area, also a place worth trying if you have a chance.

Another kind of cool quirky thing about Tony Packo’s is that they have this huge collection of hot dog rolls that are signed by celebrity types and posted on the wall. We saw the Jerry Seinfeld hot dog roll and even a Barbara Bush signed roll. There are dozens if not hundreds of signed hot dog rolls throughout the place.

Rolling out of the restaurant and onto US-20 we made our way into Indiana to rural farm country of rolling hills with lots and lots of corn….all knee high (or better) for July. Besides the corn, you also start to see lots and lots of Amish folks as well. This comes to a peak in the town of Shipshewana, IN where horses and buggies are about of as common as cars. OK, that is probably an exaggeration, but there are many to be found and lots of other neat stuff to be seen in the town as well. This is well evidenced by the following photo:

After dodging all the horse pucky along the road on our way out of town, we jumped back on the Interstate and shot over to South Bend to check out the golden dome of Notre Dame.

Notre Dame has a beautiful campus and no shortage of history itself. After a walk around the campus, we moved from South Bend, back onto the Interstate, and then made our way over to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore which is a national park facility on the shores of Lake Michigan.

We had no idea this place even existed before. It is great! - Huge sand dunes and beautiful beaches that feels more like the Outer Banks of North Carolina than Indiana. We spent the later part of the afternoon and early evening working off lunch by hiking up the Mount Baldy Dune and then making our way down to the beach and walking the shoreline for a bit.

We completed the day by making the final drive from Indiana into Illinois, and stopping for the night in Elgin, IL which is just about 20 miles past Chicago.

Tomorrow we are back onto US-20 (The Oregon Trail) and will be heading across Iowa to Sioux City for one of the longer driving days of the entire trip at about 450 miles.

It’s official, we’re on the road!

Today’s goal was to ease into the trip and make it to Perrysburg, OH just outside of Toledo…which we did, although it was a bit slow going due to the weather. As a result, we drove a good part of the day through some heavy rainstorms. 

In any case, we did make our way along to our first stop of the day at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame is located right on Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland. While we really enjoyed the location and the building architure here, we were kind of disappointed in the museum itself. While they had a lot of Rock-n-Roll artifacts, no photography was allowed in the museum and many items were no different than what you would find in the typical Hard Rock Cafe type place. So, we only hung out here for a little while, before taking a detour down to Medina, OH to visit Jeff’s best friend John (from high school) and his family for dinner. Medina, otherwise known to us as Pleasantville, is an idealistic small town center with seemingly unnaturrally friendly people. If you want to know what Medina feels like, watch The Truman Show. The place just seems to good to be true. Anyway, Thanks! John, Nancy, Marissa, Lindsay, Paul, and Sara for a nice dinner and evening…..we’ll catch you again on the way back home at the end of July.

Tomorrow we head to the Windy City of Chicago, IL.