What a beautiful day for a drive through the Wisconsin countryside! I went down to breakfast with dark skies and pouring rain, but by the time I finished eating it was only a drizzle, and less than an hour later when Scott and I set back on the road the skies were blue and sunny. Maybe it’s the fact that Wisconsin’s landscape is that of many rolling hills as opposed to the flatness of the other states we traveled through, but I found it breathtaking.
The time difference, even though it’s only an hour, is seriously screwing with our minds. Our cell phones and GPS auto-adjusted when we crossed the Indiana border yesterday, but the car clock and all our other electronic devices did not. This made things very confusing when the GPS was giving us estimated arrival times an hour sooner than our map estimates showed.
We took I 90 to cross the Mississippi – a first for both of us! – before continuing up one of the scenic America’s Byways routes recommended by Rand McNalley (crossing the Mississippi again – twice in one day!) until we reached the town of Pepin, WI. This was a destination stop so we could see the Laura Ingalls Wilder birthplace. We went to the museum first (Scott surprisingly found a shot glass for his collection; I bought a new bonnet) to get directions, then walked down to the shores of Lake Pepin to gather pretty pebbles (1870s kids were easily amused).
We went a little off the beaten path to see the farm where Laura was born. The big woods are replaced with cornfields, but they built a replica of the little house (very tiny – only a little bit bigger than our super tent, and they had a family of five LIVING in there). From there, the GPS took us off our pre-planned route for some supposed shortcuts through the corn fields (I wouldn’t have cared except we were running out of gas, and exactly none of the little Wisconsin farming villages had gas stations, so I was a bit antsy).
We did eventually find some fuel and crossed into Minnesota again over the St. Croix – very beautiful river. Made it to William O’Brien around 5:30 local time and set up the super tent for its maiden camping trip, then headed back to find some dinner in one of the riverside villages. Marine on St Croix is tiny, so we headed a little farther south to one of the towns we’d passed on the way up and which certainly has my vote for most beautiful town in America: Stillwater. We parked near Valley Bookseller, a very cool independent bookstore (though she was out of Minnesota ghost stories, so I picked one up on Wisconsin’s wraiths instead), then went to a café called the Dock for dinner and watched the boats going up and down the river.
We stayed in Stillwater later than we’d planned, so it was dusk by the time we got back to camp and the fog was already rolling in. I started the camp fire, and the damnedest thing happened – a few minutes after the wood started to catch, the whole thing just petered out. It was like someone had flipped a switch and boom, no more fire. I still had a bunch of the morning’s newspaper, so I tried to get it going again and the paper wouldn’t catch either! Even breaking out the emergency fire log didn’t help, and that thing is a brick of fire fuel. Nada. This went on for almost 20 minutes, and then all of a sudden all the paper caught and the logs that had previously started re-caught and we had a merry little blaze. Still, it was really weird.
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