Day 45 (Traversing America’s Dairyland)

Day 45
August 5, 2006
Apple Valley, MN to Cedar River, MI (363 miles)

We slept well but as we were eating breakfast it began to rain, so we had no choice but to fold up the trailer in the rain for the first time on this trip. As luck would have it, the rain stopped just as we were pulling out of the campground. In spite of the lousy weather during our last hour in Apple Valley, we felt sad to be leaving such a nice town.

Wisconsin is appropriately dubbed “America’s Dairyland.” As we drove east across it today, through Eau Claire and Wausau to Marinette, we must have passed 5,000 dairy farms. Some were obviously commercial operations with complexes of huge metal barns and as many as a dozen silos and feed bins, but most appeared to be family farms with two or three silos and one modest barn built 200 feet or so from a farmhouse. The drive was not as tiring for us as our drives were in recent days. Perhaps it was the more stimulating scenery or perhaps we are getting better at sitting in a car for 8 hours at a time. There was one segment of Route 64 near Marinette, however, that was as straight as an arrow for more than 40 miles—mind numbing. We stopped in Eau Claire to look around because our good friend from church, Leslie Hartz, grew up there, and again in Menominee, Michigan, because Frank’s college roommate, Steve Grassl, summered there for many years as a child. As we drove down Claremont, the main street through Eau Claire, it seemed like it would be a wholesome place to grow up—middle America embodied.

Eau Claire and Menominee are in many ways different. As it turned out, without planning, we arrived in Menominee during the town’s annual Waterfront Festival, a raucous 4-day celebration of the town’s proximity to Green Bay, complete with carnival rides, live music and a beer tent which was being patronized by hundreds of locals. We looked around for a few minutes, the kids went down an inflatable slide a few times and then we decided it was time to continue on to our final destination, a Michigan state park on the Bay about a half hour north of Menominee. As we were walking back to our “rig,” hundreds of motorcycles roared into town, much to the delight of the townsfolk who lined First Street and hooted and hollered with big grins on their faces. We had never experienced anything quite like it! Obviously not all the bikers in the Midwest were in Sturgis this week! We later learned that the motorcyclists were members of the Triple C Motorcycle Club, which raised $5,600 for charity by riding their bikes this weekend, although we were not clear on why people would give them money.

Menominee obviously has some working class as well as some moneyed residents. There are grand homes on the lake that rival the ones we saw yesterday in Cathedral Hill (St. Paul). Steve told us that the “old money” in Menominee came from the timber and paper industries. It is apparent that at least some of that money stayed in the town.

We arrived at J.W. Wells State Park, a very nice, wooded, campground on the shores of Green Bay near the town of Cedar River, shortly before sundown and quickly cooked turkey chili for dinner. We feel asleep in cool but very humid conditions with the sounds of Lake Michigan’s waves echoing lightly through our screens. Elliot said it reminded him of camping at Assateague Island.