Saturday, August 30, 2008

Troll Town, Futuretron and Beyond!

Our morning started with a whimsical tour through Troll Town, a small Madison suburb’s grasping attempt to keep tourists driving through despite the re-routing of the main highway. Well done Troll Town; we were sufficiently intrigued, but mostly amused by a visitor center volunteer in that phase of life when time, and conversation has slowed to a crawl. After she’d answered our questions three, albeit slowly and with a bit of a cackle, we charged onward in our Volkswagen turned Delorean and burst into Futuretron!

Not knowing quite what to expect (it is the future after all), we mustered the courage to ask the surly keepers of Delaney’s Surplus where me might find the sculptures comprising Futuretron? A quick walk through a row of giant calculators, expired mustard, and hazard clean-up kits and we’d arrived. The future was a bit rusty but no less spectacular for wear. Check out the pics at Picasa...

We’d like to take a brief commercial break to thank roadsideamerica.com for these inspired stops along the way. If you’d like to participate, feel free to send us suggestions along the route!

Our visions of a future world continued with more sculptures through Minnesota, this time more functional than fantastical; the state was riddled with wind mill farms. T Boone Pickens would be proud, and so were we.

The dawn of pretirement ended as the sun set over South Dakota and we settled into a small town of roughly 500 to set up camp and with far-fetched hopes to watch the culmination of the Democratic National Convention. Ditty’s truck stop didn’t quite seem amenable to our request, but we found a friendly bartender, a $5 pitcher of Busch Light, and a patronage only half serious about uttering the word Liberal like a swear at Club Vega, the bar in town. Turns out our waitress was even a secret supporter of Hillary, although she couldn’t get the night off to watch given, as she said “it’s not really something you bring up around here.” Our journey into the future came back to the present after we’d soaked up the Fox News begrudging commentary, heartily thanked our bartender, wished our waitress well and went to sleep in a red state, feeling a bit more encouraged that the country might soon be united across “color” lines once again.





Trolltown, Futuretron and Beyond!

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

M'er, I said NO! Once again, stay tuned for the INTERESTING stuff...

Monday, August 25, 2008

NY - Chicago in detail

CBS radio blares at 4:15 this morning. Rachel doesn’t move. I get up, and can already hear Jack rummaging in his room. He’s got a full day of work ahead of him. Our job is to drive 842 miles. Dad jogs down the stairs in his red Nike tank top, racquetball shorts and sneakers. American flag bandana, obvi. We embrace for the first of our many hugs in the next fifteen minutes.

A few minutes to load up the car, and we were on our way by 4:45. The light at the corner of Wolver Hollow and 25A took forever. Luckily the Brookville Police didn’t catch my illegal right on red.

Pennsylvania is big! And also very beautiful. We rode through the hills and valleys of the Pocono’s Mountains. Fog crept up through the valleys and sometimes across the highway. Before leaving the Keystone State, we made our first mini-venture to Sharon, PA. Born and raised in the small industrial town, my mom remembers it fondly. The evidence of a by-gone boom area was apparent in the beautiful building stock of Main Street and the current economic downturn was even more blatant in the same buildings’ shuttered doors and windows. An eerie stillness lingered in the emptiness of the town’s centre. It was hard not to comment on the upcoming election on our way out of town.

We crossed the Ohio border and were welcomed by a great sign. After that, nothing really happened for the next 8 hours. I read our atlas carefully and now I’m excited for the world’s largest flamingo in Lake Denton WI. We’ll be headed through there by the end of the week, so stay tuned for a picture. By the way, if you’re still reading this, you should probably updating your resume instead. The Buckeye state really didn’t offer much and neither does this post.

We celebrated passing through Ohio without a speeding ticket. The best of Indiana was the Indiana Dunes State Park. For about 5 miles of Lake Michigan coastline there are tremendous sand dunes! What a surprise! We stopped for about 30 minutes to wade in the lake, hike up a dune, and learn about a dune blowout. The park is located in a somewhat ironic spot: to the east you can see a nuclear power plant, and to the west, in Gary IN, a coal burning power plant.

And we're off!


Thanks for checking out our blog! We’re pretty excited to get started. We spent a great week seeing people, beaching and going to a fantastic wedding on Long Island and we’re officially off on the road trip! So far we’ve only driven from New York to Chicago, so we’ll spare you the details of the fairly boring trip. We’ll be starting off from Chicago with Z in tow on Thursday. Stay tuned for the fun stuff and pictures later on!

Saturday, August 2, 2008