Lake Wobegon

July 18, 2015

4483 Miles from Rancho Santa Fe

5293 Miles from Loreto

For some reason, every hotel now feels compelled to offer “Free Breakfast”. It's all pretty much a carbon copy. A couple of cereal choices, a juice machine, a “Make your own Waffle” thing, scrambled egg like stuff, and then regionally: California; granola, fruit, Montana; Bacon and muffins, midwest; Biscuits and gravy and sausage. I think I'd rather them charge me $10 less for the room, so I could go to the Diner next door.

Anyway, we chow down our 'Free Breakfast' and head east towards Wisconsin. The roads are pleasant, not as flat and boring as S. Dakota. There are trees!, and a few hills. The temperature is perfect, in the 70's all morning. We do a lap around Lake Wobegon and by noon we are in the small city of St Cloud, where we hunt down a WalMart so DD can hunt down a replacement mirror. Success! The temp is in the 80's now, not bad as we head for our night in St Croix Falls. Taylor Falls is in Minnesota across the river from St Croix Falls in Wisconsin, kind of like Lewiston/Auburn and RumfordMexico... (Maine)

The only room we could find in the are was a Holiday Inn Express, it was on the highway and the only restaurant was in strip mall down the street, and it was expensive. We stopped at a near by Visitor Center and the woman there was really nice and we found a little motel about 10 miles away on Balsam Lake. Well the motel has probably been around since the 50's, but it was clean and had what is considered wi-fi in the mid west. I think they buy a wireless router and hook it up to their dial-up modem. The last 4 days has been like having AOL in the nineties. We chill down a few beers, shower up and walk into town, the only restaurant closes at 3:00, but there are 3 pubs...... 

We stop at a place called "The Top Spot", it's pretty crowded, and they have salads on the menu. We sit outside, next to 2 groups of Harley Riders. I hate to be prejudice, one group was ok, but the others were pretty much idiots. The waitress's were nice (cute and young!) and the food was good. We had a few more drinks than usual and crawled back to our little hotel, this one has no "Free Breakfast"