09-09-09 !! And at 9:09 in the morning, we were on Central Ave (Rt 20), almost to Angola Indiana and heading to a lot of points west! Rt 20 from Toledo to Elkhart Indiana is mostly agricultural and the soybean fields are turning yellow and the tassels on the tops of the corn are turning brown. The sumac and maple trees are already turning red. It is our Fall West trip?
$10 in tolls on the Indiana and Illinois turnpike - I 90, got us thru Gary Indiana (right along side the electric train tracks that took us to downtown Chicago last year!), traffic choked skyscraper lined Chicago and then west to Rockford and then due north to the Wisconsin border. The landscape went from the flat farms of Indiana and Illinois to the rugged and rolling hills of Wisconsin dairy farms, past the very commercialized Wisconsin Dells and on to the river town of La Crosse, right on the east bank of the Mississippi River. So far, the gas mileage in the Chrysler minivan is 26 miles per gallon- much better than when pulling the trailer! Supper tonight was KFC and our home for the evening is HO JO’s – both with money saving coupons!
La Crosse is a well preserved, cute OLD Mississippi river town and the banks along side the downtown area are lined with several pretty little parks complete with bike paths and plenty of inviting benches along the river. One of the parks that we stopped at included a peaceful, well tended Riverside International Garden that had a small babbling brook, winding paths thru the colorful flower beds and a gazebo, right on the bank of a small stream. All thru the town are 7 ft tall ornately decorated fiberglass herons, similar to the huge painted frogs that once graced the streets of Toledo. The river is full of islands and some of the larger islands are lined with houseboats and boathouses – cottages that looked more like small garages on floating platforms, anchored by long poles into the river and secured to the shore by gangways. Each “house” was a different color and most had some kind of boat tethered between it and the next floating dwelling.
Thursday we head across the Mighty Mississippi which right now looks like a sleepy Mark Twain river and on thru a State Forest before rejoining up with Rt 90.
