June 7 - Drive to Spring Valley, Wisconsin

Urged on by clouds of hungry mosquitoes who followed our every move with dogged persistence, we chucked Monika's bike and everything else that wouldn't fit in the trailer into the back of the truck and hooked the trailer to the truck in record time. Everyone came down to the end of the driveway to see us off and it was really hard leaving them, but we also were eager to start our trip out west. We actually got on the road at 8:05 and zig zagged our way across southern Wisconsin to Beloit on the freeways before turning north on Interstate 90 to Madison. There we picked up Interstate 94 and continued northwest across Wisconsin to our intended campground near the Minnesota border, stopping only to have lunch at a Culvers we found in Tomah, Wisconsin. It was so nice to have that beef sandwich which big hunks of tender pot roast inside, and we could even indulge in a (small!) fudge sundae for desert while still keeping our tab for lunch to just over $10. I should mention here that Culvers offers a 10% Senior discount and we unabashedly take advantage of it, so you young whippersnappers would have to pay a bit more.

My homebuilt bike rack held up pretty well, which is to say it didn't fall off the trailer and drag my new bicycle on the street behind us! The metal prongs holding up the bike bent down due to the hours of bouncing around, but I bent them back straight and then screwed them in further so that they were flush against the 2x4 and wouldn't bend so easily. I also strapped the bike more tightly to the wood frame to make sure the bike didn't work its way out on the prongs and put too much force on them again. When we arrived in Highland Ridge campground the bike rack seemed to be holding up fine, and I only hoped it would stay together for the thousands of miles out to Boise and back.

The campground turned out to be an Army Corps of Engineers campground associated with one of their dammed lakes and recreation areas. The sites were large enough for our trailer, secluded in a nice forest setting, equipped with 30 amp electric service, and near very nice bathrooms and showers. They even sold ice for refrigeration. What more could we ask for? At $18 per night, we though it was a great deal and signed up for three nights so that we would have time to take Volksmarches in St. Paul and Minneapolis if we wanted to. The park ranger, a pert, enthusiastic and quite athletic looking young woman, was very helpful in getting us maps for Corps of Engineers parks in other regions of the country. She was also surprisingly delicate and circumspect about the issue of our ages. She said something like, "Gee, I'm not really good at all at estimating people's ages, but have you heard about the Golden Age pass discounts for people over 62?" What I think she really was thinking was, "Gee, these two geezers look older than dirt. I wonder if they know that we offer Fogey Fares of 1/2 price for anyone with the Golden Age pass?"

After a nap we trundled over to Spring Valley on the other side of the recreation area for some groceries. I was a bit worried about finding a store when I saw that the town's population was only 1800+, but there was a pretty decent if small grocery store on the edge of town. Inside we found bread, meat, and cheese for dinner, and contributed $14 to the local economy. We were both taken aback to see cans of soda in the machine outside the store advertised for only $.25! It was no joke, either, the machine had regular 12-ounce cans of soda for a quarter, and the only difference was that these were a local brand rather than a name brand like Coca Cola or Pepsi. Monika tried the lemon lime mix and I had a root beer, and they both tasted perfectly fine. That goes to show just how much overhead is attached to buying a can of soda from one of the national brands; basically, you're paying at least a buck extra for the name! It reminded me of the old "Sparko" brand of soda in Kenosha, Wisconsin years back where we would buy cases of soda in bottles and then every so often take back the case of empties to get some more. For some obscure reason I always got a kick out of trying all of their (cheap) flavors and shuttling the bottles back and forth in my trunk. Although these were cans rather than bottles, I found that I still enjoyed supporting the local upstart competition while drinking cheap soda!

The temperature in Minneapolis/St. Paul that day was 93 degrees, so we had the airconditioner in the trailer going and fortunately it worked like a charm. That allowed us to have dinner and work on our respective computers later in the evening in air conditioned comfort, which was infinitely preferable to sweating while typing on a keyboard. I finished the evening by re-installing the TV software on "Daddy". I had already installed and tested it before we left, but apparently for some USB devices you have to install them for each different USB port you plug them into. That quirk that doesn't apply to to virtual disk drives or my camera--they work on any port--but I have run into similar problems before with a USB printer. But once I installed the software and connected the TV signal converter box we could watch TV on the computer and check out the weather forecasts for the next day, and that definitely helped us plan out activities. The big plus to having TV on a computer was NOT having to carry around a TV in the trailer. We were carrying our computers in any event for word processing and downloading pictures, so just adding the converter box (about 3" x 5" x 1.5") took up a lot less space than an actual TV set with an equivalent screen. I was gratified to find out that the trailer's TV antenna and signal booster really worked as we had never had the opportunity to test them up to that point. That all kept us quite thoroughly occupied until it was time to turn in for the night.