Ross Lake Trail, North Cascades National Park, WA – July 2013
Our favorites:
Stay: Totem Trail Motel (family-owned, great value, Sonja is a wonderful host)
Eat: Ice cream and organic berries at Cascadian Farms / Tootsie Clark’s famous cinnamon rolls from The Eatery
Do: Thunder Knob Trail (moderate 4 miles – great views of Pyramid Mountain and Diablo Lake – Thanks Ranger Laura!)
See: 8,000 ft glacier-covered peaks everywhere you turn
Space Needle O Deck, Seattle, WA – July 2013
Some favorites (in addition to those from our first visit):
See: Chihuly Garden and Glass
Do: Enjoy the sunset from the beach at Carkeek Park
Eat: Brunch – Coastal Kitchen
Eat: Dinner – Anchovies and Olives
The day has finally arrived! We’re flying off to Seattle this afternoon to begin our seven-state, two-and-a-half-week journey back to Chicago by car. We first imagined this trip about a year and a half ago and first posted a proposed map in April 2012. It’s hard to imagine how long we’ve actually been planning this, so I’ve put together a little timeline of when we booked our major items like lodging, flight and rental car. We’ve even been able to make some other reservations along the route, like dinner at a James Beard-nominated restaurant in Fargo, North Dakota (thanks Opentable). Our best road trip advice is to always plan ahead and I think we’ve got that covered. Now we just need to watch out for grizzly bears.
Timeline of our trip planning. Click for larger view.
Field of Dreams Movie Site, Dyersville, IA – August 2010
Summer is officially here, and what better time than to go hang out on a baseball diamond in a cornfield on a farm in Iowa! The Lansing farm near Dyersville, IA – 30 miles West of Dubuque on highway 20 – was used as the primary filming location for the 1989 academy award-nominated film Field of Dreams. Producers remodeled the farmhouse, built a baseball diamond in the adjacent field, and spent 15 weeks shooting the movie on the Lansing property. After the movie’s release, the Lansings and their neighbors decided to maintain the baseball field as a tourist attraction. Since then, over a million people have stopped by, whether to play a little catch or to try out their best “Shoeless Joe” impression walking out of the corn.
Note: In 2013 the Lansings sold their farm to Go the Distance Baseball, who plan on incorporating the movie site into their controversial All-Star Ballpark Heaven development, which would convert neighboring farmland into 24 additional baseball fields.
Click for larger image
Evening ranger talk at Lake Crescent Lodge. Morning coffee at our Mammoth Cave cabin.
It’s no secret that we love to stay inside the National Parks when we visit. It’s great to be close to all the attractions and not have to drive in and out every day. The National Park Service’s vendors operate many great, historic properties that can be easily booked online as long as you plan well enough ahead. On our previous travels we’ve enjoyed the Hotel Cottages at Mammoth Cave, Mazama Village Cabins at Crater Lake, Crescent Lake Lodge at Olympic, and the Maswik and Yavapai lodges at Grand Canyon. Nothing beats waking up and having coffee on the stoop of your private cabin or stargazing in total silence and darkness in the park. In July we’ll add more to our list when we stay at Rising Sun and Swiftcurrent motor lodges in Glacier, Colter Bay Cabins at Grand Teton and Canyon Lodge Frontier Cabins at Yellowstone.
USA Today just posted an article about five lesser-known lodges of the National Park System. These are in a higher price range than we usually go for, but they look amazing. We’re wishing we’d known about the Drakesbad Guest Ranch when we visited Lassen Volcanic National Park!
Andersonville Midsommarfest, Chicago, IL – June 2011
For many Chicagoans, warm summer months mean spending quality time outside enjoying a cool drink, local crafts, and live music at one of many Summer street fests. From May to September, different neighborhoods will host a variety of themed festivals to cater to all tastes. Some of our favorites include Do-Division (early June), Andersonville Midsommarfest (mid-June), Wicker Park Fest (late July), Bucktown Arts Fest (late August), Renegade Craft Fair (early September), and Design Harvest (late September).
Vintage Potosi sign and collection of beer memorabilia in the National Brewery Museum.
Over the long holiday weekend, we decided to continue our Memorial Day tradition of visiting a Wisconsin brewery. Last year it was New Glarus Brewing. This year we headed to Potosi, just across the Mississippi from my hometown, to visit the Potosi Brewing Company and National Brewery Museum.
The Potosi Brewing Company was founded in 1852 and in the 20th Century grew into the fifth largest brewery in Wisconsin and distributed beer nationwide. It survived prohibition by making root beer and lame “near beer”, but was finally forced to close it’s doors in 1972. Over the next couple decades the building sat empty and deteriorating, even suffering major fire damage before being purchased and restored. The community rallied around the cause and created the Potosi Brewery Foundation in 2000. In 2004 the foundation was awarded the honor of being the home of the National Breweriana Association’s national museum. The collection holds thousands of pieces of brewing memorabilia, our favorite of which was the footage of vintage beer tv commercials. On the first floor is a small transportation museum detailing the important modes of 
transport that were involved in supporting the local brewing industry. Before major river bridges, Potosi even went so far as to buy a steamboat to deliver kegs twice daily to the thirsty and growing population of Dubuque, Iowa. (They still know how to put away large quantities of beer in Dubuque.)
The highlight of course, was bellying up to the large horseshoe-shaped bar in the first-floor brewpub and restaurant. The $5 museum admission includes a complimentary 8oz pour of beer. Six sample sizes of anything they have on tap will only set you back $7. A one-gallon growler goes directly from the tap into your hands for $15. There is also a full food menu. We found the warm pretzels with beer/cheese sauce and hot mustard to be a perfect compliment to sampling.
Luckily for us, unlike “Only in Wisconsin” New Glarus, Potosi has recently entered the Chicago retail market and is available at Binny’s stores. We did, however, take advantage of our drive through Dickeyville, WI, to stock up on our favorite New Glarus products at the local grocery store. The fridge is ready for summer. Cheers.
Mines of Spain State Recreation Area, Dubuque, IA – April 2011
Just south of Dubuque, IA lies Mines of Spain State Recreation Area. This land was mined for lead for centuries, first by the Mesquakie tribe, then by European settlers – most notably French Canadian fur-trader Julien Dubuque. Under Spanish rule he established a settlement (now his namesake city) and continued mining and trading in the area. Mining ceased in 1914 and the 1380-acre park was designated a State Recreation Area in 1981. It offers both hiking and cross-country skiing trails, wildlife watching opportunities, and great views of the Mississippi. The park also features the Julien Dubuque Monument: having married Mesquakie Indian Chief Peosta’s daughter Potosa, Dubuque was buried here with tribal honors in 1810.
Ever feel like you need to get away from it all? In 1978 William Least Heat-Moon did. The writer had been laid off from his teaching job at the University of Missouri and was going through a rough patch with his wife. What better way to do some self-discovery than a little road trip? Perhaps a 13,000 mile circular trek around the entire country would do the trick. He set out from Columbia, Missouri on the first day of spring in a ’75 Ford Econoline van he named Ghost Dancing with $428 stashed under the dash. The goal was to discover the true America and his true self by using primarily 2-lane back roads and going wherever his mood and his atlas took him (2-lane roads were blue on maps in those days). Blue Highways is in the same genre as John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, but more humorous and with a bit more heart.
Throughout the journey, Heat-Moon narrates from a sort of inner monologue and lets us feel like we’re in the passenger seat. He met memorable characters everywhere he traveled and we get to experience their direct quotes as well as the author’s take on the situation. There were the Trappist monks he stayed with in Georgia, the rowdy bar patrons he drank with in Texas, the future doctor in Arizona, the runaway teenager in Wisconsin, the maple syrup farmer in New Hampshire and many more. A true cross-section of 1978 USA. Some crazy things happened too: In Nevada he stepped into a strip club by accident thinking it was a roadside bar, was hired off the street to help a fishing crew unload their catch in North Carolina and got trapped in a snowstorm overnight near Cedar Breaks in Utah. Then there’s the banana slug he picked up in a forest to photograph later, only to have it mysteriously disappear inside the van … try sleeping thinking a banana slug might slime across your face in the night. All those unexpected quirky moments are part of what makes a road trip so great. (We have plenty of our own.) It’s also amazing how many people let an unknown traveler into their homes to chat, have dinner and even spend the night. Three months after leaving, he arrived back at his starting point a changed man. He’s not entirely sure exactly how he changed, but he knew he had to make the journey and then write this book to find out.
The author probably sums it up best himself in his afterword: “Perhaps it’s in our blood, maybe it’s just in our history, bur surely it’s in the American vein to head out for some other place when home becomes intolerable, or merely even when the distant side of the beyond seems a lure we can’t resist.”
One of the surprising things I found while reading is that even though the events happened in 1978, much of the subject matter he encountered is almost timeless. If you overlook that he doesn’t have a cell phone, GPS or Internet access it could have happened yesterday. Almost makes me long for the trips before we had an iPhone and iPad to connect us with the outside world.
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