Now comes the part of our road trip I've been avoiding telling anyone. Our primary purpose had been to explore the Mississippi River valley (yes, I learned how to spell that in the 2nd grade, too!), and we had originally set out to do just that. As it happened, the night we ate at Vinny's the waitress from Dubuque was telling us how great Madison was. "There's nothing in Dubuque... get to Madison as fast as you can!"

Without thinking (and I do mean there was NO thinking involved), we jumped into our rig the next day and sped our European behinds toward Wisconsin's cosmopolitan capital; it dawned on us about one hour from Galena that we'd not even seen the Mississippi...we'd not even driven the five miles west to explore what we'd come for!

Should we go back? What's wrong with us? C'est pas possible... we've missed the Mississippi!



Luckily for us, we took this picture right out of Galena. It is our formal picture of the great river, and we console ourselves saying that if you squint your eyes you can see the valley just yonder.

Still...we drove in silence for nigh on half an hour, every now and then one of us saying, Can you imagine? How did we do such a stupid thing?



To cheer ourselves up... we stopped at John Deer and snapped a few pictures; the nice Illinois/Wisconsin farmers waved to us from their hulking tractors, and that was the last we saw of the Mississippi. Sigh.