We made it back from Minnesota in one piece. Exit 208 off I-70 in Ohio has a BP with a mini-mart that sells coffee. No big deal, right? Most of those sort of places have mini-marts with coffee machines. Well, this one sells “large” coffee and cappuccino for $1.25. Large is 16 oz. Take your pick — coffee or cappuccino — for the same price. Most of these mini-marts sell it for 60 or 70 cents more. Not that, at 3am, I would have cared whether it was $1.95/pint. Still, when the guy rang up my purchase for one of each at $2.50, I was amazed. All I can think is that Morristown is in an economically depressed area, and that BP station probably gets as many truckers as it does folks in passenger vehicles.
After getting stuck in stop-and-go traffic on I-90 all the way from the Wisconsin Dells area to almost Janesville, we opted for the southern route going home. We wanted nothing of Chicago and the I-80/I-90 road all the way to Cleveland. There’s less truck traffic on the southern route, anyway, and we got to stop off for dinner at Dos Reales, the best Mexican restaurant in Champaign. We should have skipped down through Iowa, and would have, had we known ahead of time about the traffic jam in ‘Sconsin.
We drove straight through the entire way home without stopping for the night, and got the dog back from the kennel mid-morning yesterday. He was happy to see us, of course, and expressed himself by peeing what seemed like a quart on the tree immediately outside the vet’s “boarding entrance.” Thanks, Ben. Anyway, he’s already back to his old routine.
It was a great trip, and we had lots of fun visiting family over the holiday weekend. I got kissed on the nose by a kid named Obediah (the baby goat kind), and made friends with a young Holstein named Kirsten that nuzzled my hand when I stuck my arm through the electric fence. The cows will only come as close to the fence as about a foot. I was told they ignore strangers, but for some reason, Kirsten was fascinated by me. I only knew which cow she was because her ear tag had both her number and name on it. There aren’t many small, family owned dairy farms left in Minnesota. I’m really glad this one still exists.
Exit 208 was the highlight of our drive back. That, and the ridiculous (seemingly endless) wind farms in central Illinois that didn’t exist three years ago. If those were funded by my federal tax dollars, under Barry Soetoro, I’ll be rather ticked off, because they don’t produce enough electricity to power much more than a small farming community.
There’s a big wind farm south of my town that I enjoy driving buy because they’re nice enough looking to break up the boring cornfields, and I THINK they’re building more. While it’s fun to see the huge wind turbines going down the road on the back of semis while they’re being built, I wonder just how much good they’re doing.
If the gub’mint wants to build a windmill in my yard, it’s going to have to fork over upper six figs.