Road trippen across 4 states in 2 days

The big drive to Chicago was 1475 km, 13.5hrs and crossed 4 states. We were going to do it over 2 days but wanted to do as much as possible on the first day. 

We left Rapid City early in the morning, as soon as we hit the freeway on the side of the road we kept seeing signs for some place called ‘Wall Drug’ it was on my map as a point of interest and cause there were so many signs for the attraction we thought we should stop and check it out.

So glad we did, driving up to it was this big olden day strip mall in a town called ‘Wall’. We spent about 2 hours there looking around at the history, learning about the Jackalope and checking out all the western theme stores. Our favorite part was looking at all the old photos of the cowboy and Huesteads family history in relation to wall drug.

 






 

The big drive recommenced and we were off, we stopped off for lunch at Chamberlain information point for some sandwiches and checked out the Missouri river and the Louis & Clark history at the information center. I drove for the afternoon and managed to nearly drive across the whole state of Minnesota, which was a boring drive on the I90, very straight flat road and loads of corn farms.  Marc slept for most of it and I played games to keep myself awake.

Finally we made it to the Mississippi river and a place called La Cross, Wisconsin where we had decided to stop for the night. A local suggested ‘Goose Island Campground’ so we made our way there. It was a little scary driving through the wetlands to get to the campsite but it was actually a lovely camp area right along the Mississippi river. We set up the beds for the night and had some beers down by the river bank. Marc decided to set off his fireworks, never seen him so excited. 

 While sitting by the river all of a sudden all these fireflies appeared out of nowhere it was so exciting as we had never seen fireflies before they were amazing setting there little bums aglow. It was a very amazing place to stop for the night after such a long drive.

After a hot night sleep we packed up camp and took off for Chicago, only another 475 km to go. Hank did really well day one good little car hope he can keep it up for the next 4 months. 

Marc kept making fun of me for the rest of the drive because yesterday when we were talking about where to stay for the night, while driving I crossed my arms to think before answering him, Marc said “what the hell are you doing?” and I was not sure why I had crossed my arms while driving… well it was funny after a day of driving in the car and now Marc keeps doing it while he is driving to poke fun at me. 

The rest on the drive into Chicago went really well. The traffic picked up as we got closer and about 8km out of downtown we had slowed down to a crawl... We had both forgotten how slow traffic in big cities could be after living in Calgary for so long!


To summarize, after the 2 days we had crossed - South Dakota, Minnesota, drove south through Wisconsin and ended in Chicago Illinois, thank god we don't need to that again for a while!