26 December 2009

Day 8 Up North – On the Way South

Posted by BaBa under: Daily Life; Friends and Family; Travel .

We had traveled through Minnesota, Wisconsin and into Illinois. In doing so, I had added the state of Wisconsin to the list of states that I have visited. I am only missing Oregon and the few New England states to have been to all 50 states. I should get Oregon in 2010 and we will have to see about others in the coming year.

We awoke this morning well rested. The bed was just, well comfortable. No morning backaches which is always refreshing to wake up to. The surprise was that the front we had out run yesterday had appeared and caught us over night. The weather front according to the weather reports was not supposed to do this, but it had. We found that the van was covered in 6 inches of fresh snow. It would be a challenge today to drive and get out of the winter weather for good.

From Chicago (our present location) we had planned a long day of driving to our stopover in Nashville. It looked like we would not make this stop today. We had our breakfast at LaQuinta which is always good. We quickly got packed and used the luggage float to get the baggage down to the van. I went out and cleaned the snow off the top of the van and the window. We loaded up and were on the way. We were on our way to Gary Indiana navigating one freeway to another until in Gary we hit I-65 which is a straight shot down to Nashville.
To make the driving harder, the windshield wiper spray went out yesterday. So we are driving in the snow with snow coming down and the windshield covered in a thin white film made up of salt and chemicals. The only relief came when a truck would go by and spray the windshield with moisture so that we could get a clean view. We stopped once for wiper fluid and checked out the lines as best we could. It still did not work. You had to concentrate even more with the driving in order to compensate for the poor view.

I was watching the weather on the iPhone as we went. We got out from under the weather briefly at LaFayette Indiana. We stopped again at a Truck Stop and got a can of Rain-X to spray on the windshield. It helped slightly with the white film.

We continued until spotting a cheese factory at the next exit. Magoo had wanted to go to a cheese factory, so we stopped. It was a nice farm and open for business and tours. The gift shop overlooked exhibits for the various stages of cheese making process. Each station had an LCD monitor and switch to play the short tape to explain the station. The only problem was that half of the stations did not play the tape. Also there were plenty of employees, but none of them seemed to care about fixing the problem.

The store was to have cheese tasting as well. Well no, it did not despite having plenty of employees. We were prepared to buy some cheese after the tour and tasting, but bought nothing and left disappointed. Well one of us was not disappointed. Magoo was so happy to have arrived at a cheese factory and he did not leave disappointed for he did learn some parts of the process. He just did not realize that he gotten shortchanged.

Back on the road, we ran into some more snow on the way to Indianapolis. Once we left Indianapolis with lunch, we did run out from under the snow. The road had gotten clearer the more we moved south from Gary. Sometime after leaving Indianapolis the temperature started to rise and slowly got above 32. Once above 32, the wiper washing system returned to working order. It was now clean sailing through the rest of Indiana, Kentucky and on to Nashville. We stopped once more in Kentucky for an ice cream at Dairy Queen. It was a nice treat and just what we needed to make the last stretch into Nashville.

We arrived into Nashville about 6:30pm and went to the Opryland Outlet Mall to stretch our legs. I decided to stop there tonight instead of getting up to go there on Sunday. I figured that we could use a little walk and then would be free to go home tomorrow after a good night’s sleep. I went out to Jack in the Box to get the other two a snack and we settled into bed.

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