Little Car on the Prairie

I still can’t get over how much I loved Wisconsin! The towns, all across the middle of the state are all bustling with activity (and that’s on Main Street!) And here’s a reason I think; they don’t have many built-up outdoor mini-malls. You know the ones I am writing about; Target, Staples, TJ Maxx, Payless, Kohl’s, and the grocery store all lined up in a mile overlooking an ocean of a parking lot. They exist, but aren’t zoned the same and not every town has one. The Main Streets of these towns are FABULOUS! There are amazingly creative restaurants, artist’s venues, and yoga studios everywhere…and that’s EVERY TOWN I visited. The people just are so friendly and happy to answer questions about their town. A waiter in Mount Horeb talked to me at length about how to get from his town to Minnesota taking a more interesting route than the highway. I will always be eternally grateful for his help, as you will see. Below right is a picture of the little Main Street restaurant where we had lunch. It's amazing how old America it feels. Better still, they serve lefke which is a great Norwegian flat bread dish!

Wisconsin is nothing like I imagined it to be. I am ashamed of myself. I pictured rickety towns and people who are uneducated. I couldn’t have been more wrong (this is a bias I think that many Northeasterners have about the Midwest and the South…okay, about the rest of the country). This is a place where the people give a damn about themselves and their towns. I didn’t see any teenage boys with their pants hanging around their ankles, any teenage girls bursting out of their clothes, and the older people are “nattily” dressed, as they would say. The streets are spotless and each one has miles of potted flowers. I could go on and on, but instead I think I’ll book my next trip with my husband to spend oodles of time in Wisconsin.

The countryside is breathtaking. This is the dairy capitol of the country and there are more dairy cow farms than any other industry. This made me feel good inside. I didn’t feel like I was looking at the slaughter. The greenery is so lush that it goes on for miles in a deep emerald without interruption. There are small lakes with all kinds of activity on them and I would also mention that I saw about 500 people riding their bicycles on this fine Saturday all around the state. These are very active people.

We woke up early in the morning in Milwaukee and went to breakfast only to find ourselves in a room full of Native Americans! These were the long black hair braided, ethnic tunic wearing, full turquoise-wearing natives!!! The kids were wide eyed! As it turned out, they were also Incas. They were from Ecuador and were performing at the Wisconsin State Fair. The staff of the hotel was Chicapoo Natives. I just love the word Chicapoo! It’s even a better name than my hometown of Chicopee!

We decided to forego the experience of Circus World in Baraboo for something less known. We went to Little Norway in Blue Mound instead and I am so glad we did! Wisconsin and Minnesota have a deep connection with Norway, as these were the pioneers of the state. They were, perhaps, the only people on earth who could stand the bitter cold of winters in these states! The people in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota are also the tallest people I have ever seen in America.

A Norwegian who thought that the surrounding hills looked like his hometown built Little Norway. He built Norway styled houses all around the property and lived in them with other immigrants that he liked. He never married but brought in all sorts of characters to enjoy the cottages. The property is so memorable. The colors of the houses, the little trolls in the gardens, and the keeping of the World’s Fair Norwegian Chapel all made this a great experience to see firsthand. Here are some pictures from Little Norway:

We crossed over the sprawling Mississippi River that was still fairly small this far north. The Mississippi was divided into three distinct rivers with large bluffs in between them. They were choked with algae and reeds here. However, there were plenty of people enjoying a swim, a tube ride, and boating along the river.

The Northeastern corner of Iowa is remarkable! Nowhere else in America reminds me so much of Ireland. The rolling hills are so uniformly high and low that each one is about 300 ft tall so each time to ascend to the top of one, you can see as far as possible until the earth curves on the horizon. It’s amazingly beautiful and universally GREEN like I have never seen in the developed east (and I live in a region I considered green). This is also a region of mega-farming. They don’t call this area America’s Bread Basket for nothing. This is the most industrialized farming I have ever seen and it’s positively impressive. There are large combines driving down the road with all kinds of tines and scraper-y things! I can’t even imagine what half of the rolling instruments on the road are used for. All I am sure of is that they are big…like buildings on wheels.

August in Iowa is the time for leisure while waiting for things to ripen. There are so many little venues on this Saturday, people meeting in the park for celebrations. We stopped by one little fair to watch some four wheelers kick-up-some-mud. It was very sweet how supportive the community was of coming and cheering for their friends. There was also an area for classic cars, snacks, ball games, and a little girl pageant. Some boys smiled at Marley sweetly but were more like, “Who’s the new girl in town?” This is a place where everyone knows everyone else.

Iowans, on the most part, are super accepting of new people amongst them. It was an admirable trait. Instead of the full-on STARES we got from Michigonians, in Iowa we were looked at from the corner of their eyes. It was so funny! What a difference! They were also such smiley people. They smile at everyone.

What I also noted were the Amish. They have set up camp in this section of Iowa. They were everywhere but they were different from the Lancaster Amish in a few ways. The buggies were the same, the clothing was the same but more vibrant in color. Their homes were different too. They live in white saltbox houses with blue tin roofs! Their homes in Iowa look more like pioneer houses. I must admit, although begrudgingly because I loved Lancaster County, they LOOK better here and they fit in more to the culture around them. They have lots of room in Iowa to spread out, they can have bigger farms for a third of the cost, and the landscape fits their lifestyle better. As they clip clop in their buggies down the roads of Iowa, they look more normal somehow. Also, there aren’t millions of tourists in their way snapping pictures of them and saying how adorable they look. They are free to live their cultish life without much scrutiny.

This is also Laura Ingalls Wilder Country. I am such a big fan of her books, having only read them about five years ago and I still reference her books everywhere I have gone in the prairie. I was also so fortunate to have happened across her family's home in Burr Oak, Iowa. It was such a big moment for me although Marley and Cole were a bit put off. I was beside myself that I was in a place where she lived and recorded history through her 'Little House' books. She is absolutely beloved by Americans and since she lived in so many places because of her restless father, many little towns are making quite a living off of her memories. It's nice though because she's actually someone worth celebrating! Here is a picture of the kids in a smaller version of Ma and Pa Ingalls' covered wagon that sits in the back of the hotel where she worked in Burr Oak. The other picture is of the merchantile where she worked after the hotel burned down.

Driving the next morning from Albert Lea, we found ourselves in for a grind. Minnesota becomes relentlessly flat. I discovered that the driving was super easy and so I canceled my reservation in Mitchell, South Dakota to try and go a little farther. All around us were motorcyclist. Now, to say that there were motorcyclists, I mean GANGS and independent riders. By GANGS, I mean hundreds of cyclists all wearing the same logos. By logos I include “Hell’s Angels” as part of that group. They were all there by my estimation!

Western Minnesota is also part of the mega-farming industry. There wasn’t anything else apart from hundreds of miles of corn, soy, and a few other unidentifiable crops along the way. Stopping every now and again, I found that the people were also not really friendly. It isn’t that they are mean, they just don’t say much. It’s like they are mute almost. I think that comes from being so isolated in the world. There is absolutely nothing to do for hundreds of miles around and the only people who have bigger life experiences are just passing through…and trying to do it as fast as possible. I decided after the first fifty miles or so that I would be stark raving mad if I lived here.

The landscape near South Dakota starts to change is subtle ways. The land almost becomes like a savannah with a lone tree every so often. The land reminded me of pictures I have seen of Kenya. Gradually after South Dakota, the farms become scarce, the billboards become more numerous, and the cows become slaughter cattle. They don't like to have their picture taken and will get up when you come near and calmly walk to the herd.

We stopped in Mitchell, South Dakota to see the ‘World Famous Corn Palace’. I was only grateful that it was free because it’s a bit of a letdown. Once it was almost entirely made of corn as seen in this picture. Marley was super disappointed because now it is part brick, part fiberglass, and the rest is corn. What’s interesting about the place is that it is changed every year after the harvest. Other than that it’s really a bummer of a place and a depressing town. To be fair, it was Sunday and everything was closed for the day but I don’t know if I’d be dropping in to ‘Betty’s Sew and So Sewing Shop’, Harvey’s Bar, or ‘Crazy Bob’s Black Hills Gold’ (and those are the highlights of the town). We did use the Mitchell Laundromat however. The sun-weary farmers were all there too, cleaning their skivvies. We had the laptop and the iPad and were checking up on our other life back home while the rest of the room watched the History Channel. It was a nice way to pass the afternoon and surprisingly relaxing.

Now I should mention that the heat in South Dakota is nothing to ignore. The ambient temperature outside the car read 89-degrees but the heat index was 110-degrees. It felt so oppressive and the clouds looked like we were on Venus as they were so yellowed and sick looking. We all felt sick to our stomachs. Driving again, we were bombarded by butterflies that stuck to the grill. They would smack against the window and leave their ‘rainbow powder’ all over the shield. I wondered how the bikers were faring all around us. Were they covered in rainbow powder? How did they deal with all the bugs smacking them in the chest (they all took off their tops in the oppressive heat and Lady Bikers wore bikini tops)? Even butterflies must hurt as they hit you going 80 miles per hour (which is the average travel speed when the road is this straight forward and flat).

I drove about 5 hours west through the ‘Kenyan Savannah’ when suddenly, WHAM!, the landscape completely and utterly changed. We must have been on a kind of plateau because the land abruptly falls below and we came to the Missouri River. It was so beautiful, wrinkly and green! Louis and Clark (the western explorers commissioned by Thomas Jefferson in 1805) wrote in their journals that the Missouri River was so magnificently situated and so lovely that they couldn’t describe the beauty around them. Clark wrote, “Vast herds of Buffaloe, deer, Elk, and antilopes were seen feeding in every direction as far as the eye of the observer could reach” Well, thanks to the men that followed them, there are no herds of anything other than cattle to eat, but the land is still fantastically gorgeous. I think that Louis and Clark must have just been grateful to get the hell of out the Flats.

Now, this may be hard to imagine because I have never seen the affects of a river do this to any place I have ever been, but the land after the river completely and irreversibly changes. It’s remarkable. We had just entered the grasslands and they are so drippingly pretty that it’s too hard to explain. Just imagine this; there is nothing but waving amber grasses, bluish green grasses, and rolling mounds of it EVERYWHERE you look. The farms are “ghosted” shells of pioneer homes. There is nothing else and no one anywhere! It’s positively creepy.

Timothy Egan wrote in his book ‘The Worst Hard Time’ (that I am currently reading) “The land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in it’s immensity. It scares people because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disorientated…it even scared the Comanche as they chased bison over the grass. It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger, a place where the land and the weather – probably the most violent and extreme on earth – demand only one thing; humility.” And that pretty much sums up the Grasslands.

Although I will say this for the modern Grasslands, we now plant sunflowers in one part there. And I mean millions of them. They are so sweet and happy looking. We were all utterly enchanted.

We stopped by a steakhouse in Kennebec (all those meaty cattle were making my mouth water) and I discovered that all those bikers were all going to Sturgis, South Dakota for their annual Bikers Rally and 500,000 of them were expected to show up on Monday RIGHT WHERE WE WERE GOING. This is a bit of ‘Cross Country Road Magic’ I will call it. We went to Chicago and Lady Gaga was drawing record crowds, we were in Milwaukee on the opening day of the Wisconsin Fair, and on and on. It added to the excitement of the trip everywhere we went.

We landed about seven hours later in the town of Murdo. It’s the kind of place where you just sleep and get out as quick as possible. That pretty much makes up the population of the town. We stayed at the Sioux Motel that gives you scary accommodations for $136.00. The bikers are throwing money everywhere for scarce resources and they know it. So if you want to lay your head down on a plastic pillow, you’ll pay up.

The next few days will bring us to the Badlands National Park, the Black Hills, the Sturgis Bikers’ Rally, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, and then; Billings, Montana for a much needed few days rest.