Door County, Wisconsin

We made it to Door County, Wisconsin yesterday to our milemark 1607. Today we took a day of rest in our cozy campground, Tranquil Timbers. The site across from us is a semi-permanent site complete with Christmas lights and electric palm tree! We are surrounded by trees, and it is very quiet. We can hear the geese fly overhead, the crickets, as well as an occasional boat horn whistling for the drawbridge to raise over Sturgeon Bay. We slept in today (9 a.m, can you believe it??). After breakfast, we took a tour of Door County up to Gill Rock where we had a choice of a ferry ride to Washington Island, or back to our cozy camp and laundry. The laundry won out. During the day we toured what they call a winery and Peninsula State Park, one of the many state parks in Door County. We also visited several of the many orchard markets along the way and ate our way through Door County. Cherry strudel, fudge, apples, corn relish, and, for Kathy, a couple of the local brews to go with her lunch. Steve had to wait until we got back to camp for his. Yesterday on our way here we stopped and got cheddar cheese at a cheese factory, and combined it with the Door county apples for dinner tonight.

The trees are just beginning to turn here, we did see one solid red maple yesterday, but that was a fluke, I think. The sumac is red now, and the trees are hinting at turning yellow and red. As we go further north, we should see more color.

We decided that our planned 454 miles tomorrow was too far, so we are splitting the mileage up and staying at Thompson, Michigan tomorrow, and then on to Massey, Ontario on Monday.

The Prairie States

We began yesterday in Laramie (mile 412). After Cheyenne, we left the monotony of the interstate and followed the Goldwing's GPS route through Wyoming into Nebraska on the backroads. What a beautiful country we have. Everytime I travel across it, I continue to be amazed at how lucky we are to live in it. The cornfields, sugar beet fields, millet and soybean fields, and the rolling grasslands of the prairie, are all just lovely. The picture with the road and bike is what much of our travel looked like yesterday. We stayed over at the Riverside Campground just outside of Valentine, Nebraska (mile 817). The campground was alongside the Niobarra, a slow, lazy sandbar filled river.

Today we traveled across rolling farmlands in Nebraska in the morning and crossed the Missouri River at Ft. Randall into South Dakota. The picture on the left is from a scenic view spot overlooking the Missouri River behind the Ft. Randall Dam. A while later we crossed the James River still showing signs of the floods earlier this year. Many of the fields in the river bottom had been planted in the spring, but flooded, and were never replanted. But they certainly now have some fresh topsoil for next year! We traveled across South Dakota, stopped in Irene, SD for lunch, into Iowa for a while, and finally into Minnesota, getting back onto the interstate for the first time since Cheyenne.

Tonight we checked out the Albert Lea KOA (too close to the interstate) and opted for the hot tub at the Days Inn (mile 1,305). We're just down the street from the Spam Museum in Austin, MN. Tomorrow, we travel on to Door County in Eastern Wisconsin, or somewhere else if the mood takes us!

Laramie (where are we?)

Well, we got off to a cool start this a.m. When we left Bountiful at 8:18 a.m., it was 52 degrees and then dropped to 45 degrees on our way to Evanston. We stopped after 28 miles and got out our electric jackets, plugged in and warmed up. We stopped for late breakfast at Little America and then numerous rest stops along the way. It was a beautiful, but cool drive. Pronghorns, fall colors and smells abounded along the way. Here is a picture of Steve in front of our pop-up trailer set up at the KOA in Laramie, our destination for the first day. It only took us about an hour to get everything set up, but we'll get better at it with a little practice. We've had dinner and showers, and are cosy on our king bed in the tent reading and blogging! So ends our first day.