Day 3 – Minnesota

Miles traveled: 410
Hours on the Road: 7
States covered: 4 – Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota

I’ve decided to develop themes for each day, so without even reading anything, you can get an idea of what the highlight (or lowlight) of any given day was. The first day, the themes would be traffic and storms. The second the themes would be stepford people and a giant storm. The third day I’d have to go with cities and storms. Are you sensing one common theme along our journey?

I was the first one up this day. I made coffee and did a little cleaning. Since there had been a downpour through the night, all our towels and swimsuits were soaked, “Worse than if I’d dunked them in the pool,” according to Trey.

It took a while to wake my sleepy heads. Trey was pretty easy to get up, but the only way I could get Parker’s and Cal’s attention was to let the air out of their mattresses. Even with that, they stayed in the tent for another 20 minutes.


We all had cereal for breakfast, then we had to pack up. The tent was covered with caterpillars, and worse than that, when we took the fly off, we seemed to be interrupting a daddylongleg convention. Evidently, the tip-top of our tent was the best place for those creatures to be during the previous night’s storm. We had to flick off a couple dozen.

After packing up we took showers, and then we took off. The ride went smoothly, even through Gary, Indiana, where it felt like they’d set up an obstacle course to drive through. Traffic never slowed, but it changed lanes over and over so it was like driving a zig-zag course. I was definitely the slowest driver on the road there.

Our route ended up taking us through Chicago, which was pretty cool because we got to see the White Sox Stadium and drive right by the Sears Tower (which Jeff tells me is no longer named the Sears Tower). The boys have a hundred photos of it, from far away, getting closer, right next to it, then driving away.

Our campsite for the third night was at Beaver Creek Valley State Park. We got lost finding it because the road we wanted had a sign that said, “Road Closed in Two Miles.” So we had Lee take us a different way. Ten miles along that route, after having Lee direct us to drive into a cornfield (he was getting really annoyed with, constantly having to “reconfigga” as he’d say), we stopped at a golf course (they put those things everywhere, don’t they. This was LITERALLY the middle of nowhere) and asked for help. The kid told me that the road was not closed in the direction I wanted to go and that we just needed to veer to the left when the closed road continued to the right. So we turned around.

When we saw a sign for Beaver Creek Valley State Park we went down that road. Like all good state parks, it was in the boonies. As we arrived at the Ranger Station, out of (what seemed like) the blue, Parker said, “Watch out for pedophiles.” I asked him what the heck he said that for. He pointed to a sign that said, “Watch out for peds.” “Doesn’t’ that mean pedophiles?” he asked. The boy does crack me up.

It was Sunday, so the Ranger Station was closed, but the ranger just happened to be pulling down the road when I got out of my car. He got me my park pass and gave me directions to the campsite. “Just follow that road,” he said. He left off one minor detail. The road came to a river that had a sign reading, “Careful. Slippery when crossing.” I wasn’t sure I was really supposed to drive across a river. I backtracked to see if we had missed the campsites, but we hadn’t. So I went back to the Ranger Station and asked the young guy if I was really supposed to cross the river, because we don’t do things like that in Connecticut. He said yes, we were. So, we turned back around and crossed that river. The section of the river that was to be crossed had some square rocks slowing the water down. What was really neat was that each rock had a different fossil embedded in it.

As we got deeper into the woods, we realized there were only three other sites with people on them. It was kind of spooky because we were so far out in the woods, yet no one was around. We set up the tent, and since it was Sunday, the day I have set aside each week for us to eat out rather than at the campsite, we headed to the nearest town for some pizza.

Parker used the GPS to find a food place for us, and we decided on a place called Sub Zero; it was in a town called Houston. As we drove along, I said to the boys, “Nothing but cornfields in every direction. You’d go crazy living here, wouldn’t you Parker?” To which he replied, “I’d kill myself or move, whichever was easier.”

The road to Houston was so windy and hilly, it was like driving a videogame. Once again, the speed limit never slowed. These people out west are nuts. Anyone who knows me knows I like to drive fast, but I’m the old lady driving to church out here.

The boys find it very funny, and want me to mention in this blog, that Mom has been dropping the f-bomb quite frequently. What can I say, I’m under a lot of pressure, and then sometimes things just suddenly happen, and before you know it, I’ve dropped it again. Now it’s just become a joke for them.

After dinner, we went back to camp and while I did a little writing on the computer the boys played hangman. Then we called it a night.

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