Day #77 - 5/28/2011 Prairie du Chien, WI to Mt. Horeb, WI - 78 miles

A mixture of 78 miles on interstate and rural road took us to Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.  This is how we went.

Up at 4am, early morning oatmeal and on our bikes at 5am, we turned on WI-18 and cycled east.

Does it look a bit dreary, foggy and cool?  You betcha.

 

The road dipped and climbed, but nothing too onerous.  The weather remained poor: cool, cloudy with either headwinds or crosswinds, sometimes both, but never neither.  The rural Wisconsin countryside rolled along for miles and miles, differently from the farmland in the states previously traveled. I liked it. Actually, I rather loved it...there was something comforting about all the farmland...like a well-stocked refrigerator.

How screamingly immature is it to make fun of someone because of their name?  Well, sometimes
I'm like that.  It turns out that the family-owned Sukup Manufacturing Company makes a full line
of bins, grain dryers and all sorts of things to meet your grain-handling needs.  Heckuva name to
grow up with, "Sukup."  Possibilities are endless. 

The rolling hills were covered with grass and either grazing or penned cattle.  Most farm signs indicated they were “dairy farms.”  A trio of deer hopped across the road, jumped a fence and was gone. No I don't have a photo...it all happened to fast. It really did happen, though.    

Kussmaul Seeds with "elite genetics?"  It turns out that seed is serious business as most are
proprietary GMOs and there's hell-to-pay if  you don't play by the rules of the big seed technology
 companies like Monsanto.  Did you know, for example that "It is unlawful to save Roundup Ready®
Soybeans for planting or transfer to others for use as a planting seed?"  Not only that, you're not
allowed to save seed from one year to the next...new seed only.  And, heaven help you if your
neighbor's genetically modified FrankenSeed gets blown by the wind onto your property and you
are not licensed to be growing it!

Did I say how taken I was by the farmscape? 

Gently rolling hills, green grass, silos and cows...always the cows. Click on the photo for a bigger view.

Okay, so clearly if you've lived out this way, things like Sukup bins, grain silos and barnyard animals are everyday stuff and that I've lived a sheltered urban existence. Clearly. Anyway, there's stuff out here you just don't see where most Americans live. This was one of the many things that made the trip special.

Are these cowhouses?  Or is that "cow house"?  Whatever,  a vacancy exists between cow #2467- #2469 and  #2469-#2470.  What of cow #2468?  Out to graze?  Out for dinner?  Being served as dinner?  

 24 miles of cycling brought us to Mt. Ida, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community of 523 people.  

40% of Mount Ida residents report German ancestry, and 17% report Irish.   99.62% are White with  0.19% Asians (that's .9937 Asians)

The smallest of small towns keep it simple: a combined town hall community center for all their local needs.

The median household income was $42500, which is a lot better than , say, Navasota, Texas ($26990), which I took to mean that the farming in this area was pretty good.  It's probably those Kussmaul Seeds with their elite genetics.

 30 miles after leaving Prairie du Chien, we pulled into Fennimore, Wisconsin, a bustling town of 2500 with schools, museums, industry and community life.

"Kiwanis" is from the Otchipew American Indian expression, "Nunc Kee-wanis", translated as "we trade," "we share our talents," "we make a noise," or "we meet."  Kiwanis International is a service organization whose current motto is "Serving the Children of the World".   I thought their stance here a bit aggressive.

 We had no choice but to stop at the miniature railroad yard and the nearby Railroad Historical Society Museum.  

The original Dinky locomotive is owned by the city of Pioche, Nevada, and is on display there.  A 1907 Davenport 2-6-0 locomotive was obtained through the efforts of the members of the Fennimore Railroad Historical Society and pretty much is identical to the original Dinky.

Surrounding the Dinky is an operational 15" gauge rail with 700 feet of track, complete with scale buildings. Rides are available ($1.00 for a train ride) on the 15" miniature train system on weekends and scheduled holidays.

The Wilkinson Railroad consists of a depot, engine barn, water tower, gondola, 2 hopper cars, coach, two engines and a caboose. The engines, a diesel locomotive and a 4-4-0 steam locomotive, took up to three years each to build. The diesel locomotive pulls the outdoor train, while the 4-4-0 steam engine is on display inside the museum.  Be sure to click on the picture of a larger panorama. 

Fennimore has a nice segment in the book Wisconsin Off The Beaten Path: A Guide to Unique Places, where the Fennimore Doll and Toy Museum also gets a nice write-up.

The Dinky operated from 1878 to 1926.

Something else I appreciated in the smallest of small towns was the frequent occurrence of a bowling alley...and it makes total sense.  Indoors, egalitarian, and appealing to even the most athletically disinclined, the bowling alley was a place for all to have fun.

Fennimore Lanes offers league and youth bowling.

 46 miles after our departure, we pulled into Cobb, Wisconsin, a village of 442 and home to the annual Cobb Corn Roast.  It does not get much more clever than that.

The annual Cobb Corn Roast is a multi-day event featuring fast and slow pitch softball,  volleyball, poker, a parade, all the corn and BBQed chicken that you could possibly want and enough fun stuff that I'm thinking of coming back here at the next opportunity.

 55 miles brought us to Dodgeville, our intended destination for the day.  I was uncomfortable and had had enough biking for the day; Lani wanted to continue all the way to Madison-another 40 miles…so we continued.  I was plenty irritated and wasn’t shy about letting it show...which meant I could bitch without evening speaking...I radiated bitch. It was here that WI-18 turned into a 4-lane highway.  The shoulders were wide and we both felt safe, but it was so much less scenic than the rural/county roads we had traveled since Pierre, SD.   At 75 miles, Lani [wisely] suggested we pull off the highway and headed into Mt. Horeb.

Named by an Englishman after Mt. Horeb (where Moses received the Ten Commandments),  the village was settled  first settled by people of English, German, Irish, Norwegian, Scottish and Swiss descent, yet in the late 1800's more than 75% of the community was Norwegian.    

What a charming town, proudly displaying its Norweigian heritage.  Troll statues and signs were posing throughout the town.  A cheese shop advertised its selection of 20 brats and we were both nearly overwhelmed be the desired to eat sausage.

The town definitely had this troll-thing going.  Trolls emanate from Scandinavian folklore.  The story of the trolls in Mt. Horeb relate to an effort by the town to maintain a steady flow of traffic after a highway bypass was built.

We skipped lunch, anticipating dinner at one of the nicer restaurants that didn’t open until 4pm (as was the case for most of the eateries.) The downtown was pretty charming and we took our time making our way along. When biking, it's nice not being in a hurry to get somewhere.

Hey...it looks like a couple of people on fully-loaded touring cycles stopped to check out the used book store.  Figure that...

Mount Horeb was once home to the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum, now relocated to Middleton, WI where it is now known as the National Mustard Museum.  I'm not making this stuff up.  The museum store has hundreds of varieties of mustard that can be sampled before purchase. The museum exhibits a large collection of unusual mustards and antique mustard jars.

The book store had antiques and what can only be mustard jugs.

There were two motels in town; one quaint and already booked for the evening, the other dumpy with smelly rooms that had vacancies...or is that vacancies with smelly rooms? Or smelly vacant rooms? I guess it really doesn't matter because the room we checked into was both vacant and smelly. We showered, unwound and wondered: where do these smells come from?

The restaurant, Bistro 101, was classy with a nice wine list.  We shared an appetizer (the artisanal Wisconsin cheese plate), enjoyed separate salads, and split an 8oz filet mignon from locally raised grass-fed cows…a great piece of meat.  We skipped on dessert, discovering some time ago that the most cost-effective way to have dessert is to stop at a gas station C-store and buy an ice cream bar for a dollar.

Back in our smelly room, I reflected:  I was still loving the daily adventure, biking the rural roads (though the cold, damp, windy weather was a spoiler), entering and discovering small towns and the time with Lani. The 3rd rate motels with their funky smells, granular pillows, wafer-thin shower towels and dank bathrooms were a small price to pay for the experience, an experience that was now just a few days from ending.  I was sad. 
Anyway, my petulance from earlier in the day aside, we covered 78 miles and finished another great day in a quaint American town.
Tomorrow: a short ride to Madison, WI