South Through Wisconsin onto Indiana

Time to say goodbye to North Shore of Lake Superior and the tourist town of Grand Marais Minnesota and head south toward Indiana for the RV repairs.  Going by way of Wisconsin we stay in the Chippewa Falls County Fairgrounds.  Very strange place but a good deal for this part of the country, $20 includes electric and water.  It is basically a field with spaced out hook ups.  It is self-registration, you just fill out the envelope and put your money in the box.  The place is kind of eerie with the empty building used to house livestock during the fair.  The restrooms are in a big red barn-looking building.  We were able to walk into town and get some dinner but there is a distinct lack of healthy food and vegetables in this part of the country.  We end up with a veggie pizza.  The next day we meet up with a former colleague of mine who is currently working in the Chicago Office spending weekends in Wisconsin.  It was great to get caught up on the state of affairs at the old office.

Heading further south we make a stop in Madison, Wisconsin.  I have always heard it is a cool college town so we figured why not stop.  We were able to do some healthy grocery shopping at a Whole Foods which was like coming home.  In the Whole Foods we were approached by an older lady who wants to know if we are the people with the Sprinter in the parking lot.  With pencil and paper in hand she starts asking us questions on how we decided on the van and how it is working out for us.  She wants to get out of Madison and is considering hitting the road on her own but not sure what type of vehicle to get.  We also talked about getting rid of stuff verses keeping it in storage.  We gave her our view of how stuff just holds you down and she said we are wise beyond our years.

In Madison, we stayed in a county park which had a paved bike path running right near it.  With the path right there and a campground with showers and no rain in sight we were out of excuses for not riding our bikes.  After Tim pulled the bikes out of the van, put on the front wheels and seats we sprayed ourselves down with bug spray (something we NEVER had to worry about in Scottsdale) and hit the bike trail.  It was great to be on the bike again.

On to Huntington, Indiana where Sportsmobile has one of three of their facilities.  Looking forward to staying at the Comfort Inn with some AC.  It turns out the Sportsmobile shop is much smaller than the Fresno California location where we actually purchased the van.  In Indiana they can only fit two vans in the shop at a time, in Fresno they work on 12 – 20 at a once.  The guys in Indiana are able to fix some of our problems but cannot replace the warped cabinet door because they use a different color wood for their cabinets.  That will have to wait until we get back to California.I forgot to get a picture of the Indiana facility but here is the Fresno facility.

Looking for cooler weather, the closest place I see on the map is the Adirondacks in upstate New York.  That is where we are going!