Neil has mentioned in his Blog that Wisconsin is called America’s Dairyland, and we saw today just how seriously they take their love of dairy products – particularly cheese. The people of the state are even known colloquially as Cheeseheads! As we headed south of Wausau we passed through lovely green agricultural country, we’re really out of the Northwoods…for now. The weather was grey all day today. Along the road we saw many signs for Cheese companies, dairy cows and pretty farms.
As well as some really lovely, classic American farm homes.
Our first stop was in Neillsville, where I’d read about Chatty Belle, the Worlds Largest Talking Cow. However, it wasn’t until we arrived that I discovered I had a real connection to the place. Chatte Belle was in the park attached to a rather peculiar building that turned out to have been the Wisconsin Pavilion at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. I visited the fair with Mum , Dad and owen as a child so I guess i must have seen it before, even if I didn’t remember it. I put a quarter in Chatty belles paybox and listened to her speil.
We carried on further south to La Crosse, which sits just on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River. Here we’d come to see the Worlds Largest Six Pack of Beer, which is proudly displayed at the premises of the town’s City Brewery Company. There were a few other beer related sights in the street – clearly they love their beer in la Crosse just as much as their cheese!
We crossed the river into Minnesota, thus making it to our 41st state of the Union. We stopped at the visitor centre by the river to have our picnic lunch. Lock No 7 could be seen just up the river from the picnic area. In the 1930s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built a series of locks and dams on the Mississippi River to maintain a navigational channel of at least nine feet in depth.
We drove up along the banks of the river on the Minnesota side along some of the Minnesota sectionof the Great River Road. At Winona , a pretty little University town we crossed the river back into Wisconsin because there were a couple of sights to see from that side of the river… and that we we got to drive some of the Wisconsin Great River Road.
At Fountain City there is a pretty extraordinary “sight”, called the Rock in The House. On April 24, 1995, a 55-ton boulder rolled down a hill and crashed into the bedroom of the house of Maxine and Dwight Anderson at 440 North Shore Drive in Fountain City, Wisconsin. No one was killed or injured, but Maxine had just finished remodeling the house and moments ago was in the very bedroom photographing it. Shaken by the incident, the Anderson’s sold the house and moved out within a month.
The house’s new owner, John Burt, a real estate investor, instead of restoring the house, renamed the property “Rock in the House,” hung a sign and turned it into a tourist attraction. The 16-foot tall disk shaped rock is still wedged on the back of the house. Splintered wood, dirt and debris lie scattered inside the bedroom and around the place.
We continued on down the Great River Road to Alma, where we drove up the bluff to Buena Vista park, with a lovely view down over the Mississippi Valley, we could get a good view over Lock Number 4 here and Neil gave the drone a spin. He got some good footage of the river… and cornfields!
Not long after we left Alam the weather deteriorated and we drive through some really heavy rain all the way to Minneapolis. Luckily it cleared up just before we arrived at our Country Inn & Suites, next door to the Mall of America. The mall is the biggest one in the USA, inside there’s a theme park and Sealife aquarium, there are two hotels attached at each end and 555 stores. Woo hoo! It’s a real destination for Americans, apparently 4 in 10 of their visitors are tourists. We went straight over to do a little shopping and were gobsmacked at the scale of the place.
We ate our lunch at Bugga Gumps Fish Restaurant ( one of many full service restaurants within the mall, and old favourite from previous trips. The appetizer sampler was delicious, lots of cajun flavours.
When we came back we needed to do laundry and tried to do some blogging but the internet connection in the evening was dreadfull, we decided to try again the next day instead.