Road Trip Day 5: Minneapolis, MN to Rockford, IL
Distance driven:341 mi
Time including all stops: 8 hours 31 minutes
I woke up around 9. Lynette was up. My mother was up a few minutes later. Lynette asked what I thought of the thunderstorm. What thunderstorm, I said? They couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard it. The lightning and thunder had been practically right over house. The thunder had rolled continuously for several minutes. I had been in the basement with a small window and I had been dead tired. I told Lynette it must have been the comfortable bed.
We ended up going out to breakfast. Lynette has exquisite taste in food, and Lucia’s Bakery did not disappoint. The pain au chocolat was nice and buttery. The fruit salad was the best I’d had in a long time. The coffee was good. After breakfast, Lynette drove us back along a couple of lakes and scenic highways. We decided to skip seeing where the bridge had collapsed.
We left Tim’s house around 11:30 a.m. Just after we crossed into Wisconsin, it started to rain. We had heard about the horrible rains and floods in the Midwest, and had been very lucky so far to avoid it. Here, though, it seemed our luck had run out. The rain started coming down so hard, I had to pull off the freeway. I bought gas and hit the restroom to make the time useful. By the time the gas tank was full, the rain had slowed enough to safely get on the road again.
We changed drivers in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Mom drove on through the newly found sunshine while I took a needed nap. We switched again at a rest area about 30 miles north of Madison. At the rest area, I got a map of Wisconsin which turned out to be very important, as somehow our Auto Club guidebook of Wisconsin was not in the car.
Following the map’s directions, we took the exit from I-39/90/94 for Highway 151 and wound our way around the State House to a parking space near State Street. It was now 4:30 p.m. My mother got a phone call from work, and while she talked I browsed the “Wines of the World” we had coincidentally parked in front of. I found two wines from Georgia (the former Soviet Republic, not the U.S. state), but they were marked “semi-sweet” so I was afraid they would be too sweet for me. I was shocked to see not only German beer, but authentic German beer glasses. My poor friend Peter had already been upset to find out that the Paulaner beer he had schlepped 8,000 miles was readily available in stores in the U.S. I wasn’t sure how I was going to break to him the news that the glasses he had brought could be found in Wisconsin. Maybe it would help to know that they would have been hard to find in L.A. or Philly.
Mom got off the phone and we walked down the street. We hadn’t stopped for lunch, and were hungry for dinner. We stumbled on two Afghan restaurants across the street from each other. We hadn’t had Afghan food for years; we had enjoyed it at a restaurant in Georgetown (a D.C. neighborhood) a couple of times, but it went out of business years ago. We decided it was worth eating again, and chose to eat at Maza. We started with bulani, a fried appetizer filled with what tasted like mashed potatoes. We dipped it in yogurt and a green sauce. Then we were given salads with a special dressing and naan (flatbread). Mom had the lamb kabuli palow—lamb with brown rice, carrots, almonds, and raisins. I had the chicken korma, chicken in a spicy red-brown sauce with green peppers. Everything was delicious and filling. The waiter nevertheless managed to talk us into dessert—baklava made from the owner’s special recipe. It wasn’t overly sweet. You could taste the nuts and the pastry as well as the honey. It was amazing.
The waiter also gave us advice on where to go to get Wisconsin souvenirs. In addition to getting two t-shirts for the price of one, we were able to get a map of downtown Madison, something that hadn’t been available at the rest area. We walked back to the car. After looking at the map, I concluded that if we went back exactly the way we came, it would put us very far north, and there was an alternate route that would keep us to the east and south.
We took off, and spent several frustrating minutes being turned around by one-way streets, road construction, and “No Left Turn” signs until we found John Nolen Highway along the lake and found our way to the Beltway, which led us to the 39/90. We made it to Rockford, IL by 8:30 p.m.
I changed and went downstairs to use the hotel pool. I was stunned to see that the Jacuzzi was not a regular hot tub but a whirlpool that seemed to have minerals in it. I did some exercises in the regular pool, then went back in to the whirlpool for a few minutes. I dragged myself out soonafter; I was afraid if I didn’t leave then, I never would leave.
Tags: Road Trip USA, Travel, U.S.
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