Navigating by GPS is great, but realistically you have no real idea of the big picture. I could plot a course to the Million Dollar Bar in downtown Jackson just fine with my GPS, but I could not plot a 4 day road trip across the prairie to Chicago that would take in the places where we wanted to stop off and visit along the way without that old style thing... the map. I love maps, I really do. I love to see where I am and where other interesting places are that I have never visited. I also like to see where I have visited in the past as that brings back some very happy memories so have bought some big area maps for home and have started to push little pins into them marking where we have been! I know, pretty anal. Whatever. So I bought some road maps and along with Google Maps started plotting our way back to Chicago. Total distance approximately 1500 miles with stops and side tracks along the way; 4 days and 3 nights; how long in each side visit....
 |
| See. People still do do back of the envelope! |
It took us to some fun places too. The further east we drove, the more cars, people and towns we encountered. The stretch across Minnesota was fairly busy. It could have been the 4th July driving weekend I suppose but that bit wasn't as enjoyable as the earlier bits. For accommodation I chose wherever I could to stay at places on the Missouri River, trying to keep a Lewis and Clarke theme if I could. It didn't work after the Little Big Horn excursion as that area is almost totally devoid of towns, the nearest being a tiny town called Hardin where things closed down at 8.30 pm which came as something of a shock when we were looking for dinner. It turned out just fine in the end though but it did make us consider that we should probably look to do things earlier in the evening for the next couple of days.
We chose Wisconsin Dells because of its proximity to Chicago (less than 3 hours on our final day) and because we wanted to try some cheese! However if you want to know what we enjoyed the most on our road trip, in no particular order they are:
 |
| The Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. Viv bought a can when we came back to Penang! |
 |
The sight of Viv cleaning dead bugs off the windscreen and the amount of hand soap used afterwards
|
 |
| The really beautiful locations |
 |
| The huge country... and of course the hat. |
 |
| The ever changing roads |
 |
| Most of all the company |
No comments:
Post a Comment