Minnesota

One thing I never expected was how hard I was going to fall in love with southwestern Wisconsin on this trip. The morning after I left Paul and Jeani's was sunny and warm, a welcome change from the drizzly grayness that greeted me when I reached Chicago the day before. As I drove through Darien, Whitewater, and Fort Atkinson, WI, I couldn't help but entertain the notion of leaving everything behind and settling there, maybe finishing school and becoming a teacher in some rural Wisconsin town where they would wholeheartedly embrace my wacky big city ways. I didn't say it was a realistic notion... Maybe it's because I was born in that state, but something about Wisconsin just felt like home. It was the same feeling I got when I visited Portland for the first time...something just felt right about it.

But Wisconsin wasn't my destination. I was on my way to Rochester, Minnesota, to camp at Whitewater State Park. This was the first camping I had done since Kansas, approximately 8 states ago, so I was excited to get back in the swing. Something about spending all that time in other people's houses had thrown me off a little...as gracious as every one of my hosts was, and as comfortable as I felt, it was still nice to have a night with no socializing, no worrying about being in someone's way, no internet. Hard to disconnect from that internet, you know. So I was looking forward to camping in Whitewater SP.

You would think I would have learned my lesson in Lafayette when my phone sent me to the wrong house, but I clearly hadn't. I punched in 'Whitewater State Park' and was given a set of directions that I followed to the letter until I realized that I was (literally) on a lonely dirt road in the middle of a cornfield with no state park in sight. Oh dear. So I backtracked...a LOT...and started following the road signs for Whitewater instead.

It turns out the road signs are perhaps a tad more accurate, because I actually reached the park by following them. Whitewater's camping rates were expensive (over $30 per night) and I'm still not entirely sure why. The site itself reminded me of my first site back at Honeyman SP. Just some grass, a fire ring, a picnic table, and a parking pad. The end. Not that sites at any of the other parks had been like luxury hotels or anything, but $30+ is a lot for a campsite. Anyway.

I was draaaaagggging by the time I got to my site, but it was still plenty light out and nobody else was there to care how quickly I was moving, so I took my sweet time getting my tent set up. I had bought a bundle of wood at the ranger station so I started a nice fire in the ring and settled down with my book (The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman...a good read if you're into cooking at all). Whitewater seemed to be a good park for birdwatching, as I saw at least five or six interesting species of bird in the trees near my site.

This next part I'm not all that proud of....it turned out my site at Whitewater had an electrical hookup. I just happened to have a 15 foot extension cord and a whole slew of episodes of House I had missed in the last season on my laptop sooo....let's just say maybe I didn't commune with nature quite as much as one would hope when camping. I even unstaked my tent and moved it closer to the power source so I could watch from inside the tent and avoid the bugs that were attracted to the light given off by my laptop screen. Some time later I fell asleep to the the soft blue glow of the charging light...:)

The next morning I packed up and got out of there. I think one of my favorite parts of any of the camping legs was the packing up the tent and leaving thing. There was something so satisfying about knowing I had everything I unpacked back in the car in the right place (but not obsessively so :P) and I could be on my way.

The route for the day was kind of up in the air. I had attempted to change my reservation at Big Sioux, my intended destination for that night, but they had been booked solid for that day so when I left Rochester my first thought was to just grab a hotel somewhere between there and Badlands National Park whenever I felt ready to stop driving. I had a bit of an idea to take a few hours' detour up to Minneapolis to have lunch at this restaurant Paul and Peter were raving about, Hell's Kitchen. On this trip, a bit of an idea is all you need, so of course I went.

Rochester is a little over an hour outside of Mpls and I got the impression while driving between the two cities that a lot of people probably live in Rochester and work in the twin cities area. It was kind of a depressing commute...it reminded me of when I lived in Athens and worked in Atlanta. Now I live around 2 miles from my job and I couldn't be happier about it. It's a pretty dreadful feeling to know that even if there is no traffic whatsoever it's still going to take you an hour to get home.

So. Minneapolis. I had approximately zero expectations of Minneapolis. I can't say that I've ever spent all that much time thinking about it, honestly. As I drove into the city, headed for Hell's Kitchen, I saw a billboard advertising an exhibit of Titanic artifacts at the Science Museum of Minnesota. At that moment I started to get an inkling that maybe I would like to stay the night in Minneapolis and really see the city. I pulled into a parking garage around the corner from HK and looked at my budget on the laptop. Everything looked good, in fact everything looked more than good. I was starting to get a little worried...things couldn't possibly be going this well at this point, could they? I closed everything after booking my hotel room and took the elevator down to the street, feeling bouyed by my abundant funds with a nagging little doubt in the back of my mind.

I had made my way to HK, been shown to a table, and was perusing the menu before it finally occurred to me. See, I do my budgeting on this spreadsheet. I put my current balance at the top and then on the left I list all of my upcoming bills and expenses and the column to the right shows what the balance will be after these expenses are removed from the account. Well I'm reading over the description for the steak and eggs when I felt a stabbing of fear and anxiety down my back. I had forgotten to update the current balance!!! So no wonder my budget thought I had all this extra money...the current balance was the same as it was a few weeks ago, very early into the trip. Oh. Crap. I did my best to enjoy the lunch I had come all the way to Mpls for and put my money woes out of my mind until I could verify my mistake.

After lunch I headed back to the parking deck but in the elevator I was struck with another alarming realization: I hadn't bothered to notice where I parked before I left the deck. Sigh... So I tried guessing, then I tried looking at each floor. In the end I had to go to about five different floors before I finally found the car. All I could do was roll my eyes and laugh at myself at that point...there were more important things to mentally flog myself about.

So yes, I booted up the laptop and pulled up my budget and alas...I was not wrong about the mistake I had made. My steak and eggs churned in my stomach as I tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do. Suddenly the clouds parted as a generous benefactor who shall remain nameless (my mom) had at that moment sent me an email asking if I needed a little extra cash to get home. I gritted my teeth against the voices in my head screaming about how much I had fucked up and accepted her gracious offer of assistance. So, emotional upheaval notwithstanding, on paper the problem was solved. Time for the Titanic.

The Science Museum of Minnesota is located in St. Paul. Paul and Peter had been kind of meh about St. Paul but I really liked it. The architecture had a nice, quaint, smaller town feel to it and I found myself again thinking about how I might like to live there. It was nice :)

So I went to the Titanic exhibit in the SMM which is normally right up my alley, but I think at this point I've maybe seen so much Titanic stuff that it's not all that special to me anymore. I did like seeing all of the artifacts though and I really enjoyed the mock-ups of the first and third class staterooms (also how expensive they were...a one way trip in first class was upwards of forty grand!!) and another room where they had a giant chunk of ice that you could touch to get an idea of how cold that iceberg must have been. It was a neat idea. There was also a room with a projection of a lifeboat plan on the floor so you could see how big they actually were. One of the reasons the lifeboats weren't full is that people felt more secure on the big ship than in the (comparatively smaller of course) lifeboats, so I can only imagine how gigantic the ship must have felt, to be sinking and still seem safer than these giant lifeboats. Another nice touch: when you enter the exhibit you're given a card with some information about a particular passenger on board and at the end you can look at the lists of survivors and those who perished for your passenger's name. Mine survived, and I was very glad of it because she was a young pregnant girl. All of the survivors are dead now too, of course, but I like to think that she and her baby had some happy years to enjoy after the disaster.

I had purchased a ticket to the Titanic-related IMAX movie playing at the museum, so after the exhibit I made my way down to the theater. I typically tend to avoid IMAX theaters because they don't ever have moveable armrests, but I had been to three theaters without moveable armrests so far on the trip (Joshua Tree, Sudekum Planetarium, and Lafayette) and everything had gone fine, so I figured what the hell. I was still a little nervous about being comfortable, but it turns out my anxieties were unfounded. I fit just fine and though it was a little squeezy, it wasn't enough to disrupt my enjoyment of the film. Yay for pushing boundaries!

I was of the mind that no trip to the Minneapolis area would be complete without a visit to the Mall of America, so I didn't spent much more time in the SMM before heading for the parking garage (and yes, this time I remembered to make a note that I was in the green dinosaur section :D).

You may not believe this, but the Mall of America is just like a big mall. With a theme park inside. The parking garage there was big enough to fit a regular sized mall into, I think. And boy, was it crowded!! I'm not really a mall fan in general, but the number of people who wanted to cram themselves into MoA was just insane! I didn't have any particular goal when I got to MoA, I just wanted to see it. So I walked around a little bit, then found a MoA gift shop where I got William the cheesiest keychain in the world (it flashes his name and says mall of america on the back. Fantastic!). I was getting a little hungry and after the morning's money freakout I was all about eating on the cheap, so I took the escalator two floors up to the food court and had some bland and questionable chicken(?) teriyaki. Good to know that's the same everywhere. I took my tray over to the balcony that overlooks the theme park and watched all of the kids on the roller coasters for a while. It reminded me of how much I used to love roller coasters and how humiliating it was, as an older teenager, when I became too hippy to ride them. Bah. Anyway, the MoA is a giant spectacle, but it's also just a mall. I wandered around a bit more before I was sooo ready to go. I drove down the road a little ways to my hotel (a really nice one!) and settled in for a nice, relaxing evening.