Expect Delays — and Beer

It’s become the theme for the trip, and not just in that I’m three days behind on the blogging. But things seem to happen for a reason, so we’ve tolerated it all so far.

Day 2/4, also known as Monday, began fine. Up at some ungodly hour, in the cars and rolling by 6:00. And by 6:15, we’d taken a wrong turn.

No big deal; it put us right at an affordable gas station, and the adjoining McDonalds offered a two-hour wireless connection for $3. I know, I know, it’s strictly a worse value than the previous days $10 for 24 hours, but how much internet access do you need on the road? I took it, did some quick email correspondence, reconfirmed that the Sox completely suck and have thrown away the season, and wrapped it all up in under ten minutes. THAT’S why $3 is better than $10.

Things do indeed happen for a reason. By 6:45 we were neck deep in Chicago traffic. With the nearly two and a hlaf hours of stop-and-go traffic, we’d have never made it through the city without the wrong turn gas stop. And without gas to keep the cars running or the traffic, we’d have never discovered that over one week earlier, back in New Hampshire, Heather’s car had broken down.

Eh? Come again? How exactly does that work?

Around the two hour mark into the traffic, Heather and Liz buzzed Keith and I on the walkie-talkies. Heather’s car was overheating profusely. The temperature guage needle had buried itself in the red until they turned up the heat in the car full blast. Then the needle evened out for a few minutes before once again going the way of Samuel L. Jackson when he and Travolta were cleaning up the Marvin mess.

We pulled over at mile marker 84 and popped the hood. The radiator fluid cap came off and the reserved boiled out for a solid ten minutes. I caled Triple-A and spoke to a call center girl who had never heard of highway mile markers. When it became clear that she herself wouldn’t be much help, I got a list of local mechanics and made some calls. There was a Firestone just a few blocks away, and we made it there without much else going wrong.

Tony, the manager of the Firestone, explained to us that the Radiator Fan Assembly in Heather’s car had crapped out several days ago. The fact that all of our driving from that point had been predominantly high-speed and long distance meant that there was plenty of air already flowing through the radiator and keeping things cool. Once we hit traffic, the ambient air flow wasn’t enough, and the busted fan showed up on the proverbial radar.

The real serendipity here is that Chicago is a big enough city to have traffic in the first place. Which means Chicago is also big enough to have many, many mechanics and parts distributors. If we’d had this problem at any other point along the way, we might not have been able to have it fixed as easily.

So we killed the better part of our morning wandering around what I’m assuming was the Gladstone neighborhod. Keith bought a six-dollar sweatshirt, as he had no other suitable rain coverage. We found the American Science and Surplus Store, which was completely amazing; they had an endless supply of the sorts of things third graders use in science fair projects they don’t understand. I bought an action figure of Edgar Allen Poe. Heather found a camera apable of taking four photos on one frame of film. Seriously, that place was amazing.

We had lunch at the Blue Angels Diner. It turns out that Keith has been everyfrigginwhere in the U.S.; as we walked in he says, ”Oh, yeah, I’ve eaten here before”. We’re in a random Chicago neighborhood having somewhat random unexpected repairs made to Heather’s car, and Keith has been here before.

I give up.

By 1:30 we were fixed and back on the road.

And it rained.

And rained.

And we stopped four million times to pay tolls on the Illinois Tollway.

Then, at some point, Illinois ended and Wisconsin began.

And there was even more rain.

Somewhere down the road, the rain let up and we opted for a break. In the middle of nowhere we found a monstrous mall with an Old Navy, and Keith replaced the six-dollar sweatshirt with something more substantial. But that’s not what you want to hear about at all, so I’ll fast forward to LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

The city of LaCrosse has an old brewery with six very large distilling tanks. Along the left side of Route 53 South, these six tanks stand proudly, bearing the outer markings of LaCrosse beer cans gone wild in four-plus stories of yeasty glory. Now, I myself am not a beer connosiuer, but DAMN, that’s a lot of beer! The side of one can visibly lists the contents at over 14 MILLION fluid ounces. Here’s the coolest thing about the six pack though: whereas there are plenty of World’s Largest Things, not so many of them are actually functional. The World’s Largest Six Pack of Beer, being that it is a six-chamber distilling tank, is really full of (nearly) functional beer.



Sadly we’d gotten to LaCrosse too late for the brewery tour and gift shop, but felt at least a little vindicated that after the detour in Chicago, we still got to see the World’s Largest Six Pack of Beer. Instead, we found a park alongside the Mississippi river with a mildly stereotypical statue of Hiawatha. It would seem that “mildly sterotypical” is more palatable than “blatantly racist”, as the plaque indicated that the statue had gone up at some point in the sixties. Our tour guide book mentioned that the statue had gone up significantly earlier than that, and that it had borne the inscription “Me Welcome You to LaCrosse”. The photo in the book was also not the same as the statue we saw in person (the one in the book was actually more artistic and less offensive than the new one). At some point someone pulled a switch, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. You’d have to go see it for youself to judge.





Keith tried to hug the beer. There may have been too much beer for such a gesture to be properly appreciated.

We left LaCrosse pretty sure we’d be falling short of our goal of ending the day in Souix Falls, South Dakota. Rochester, Minnesota certainly fit that bill, though the Holiday Inn was considered by all to be a step up from the Red Roof Inn we were originally going to stop at.

And that’s that. One new radiator fan and about two hundred fewer miles than we had wanted to complete, but we got to see beer. Lots of it.


And somehow made it through without tapping any of the tanks.