The East of the Mid-West

We are now in Port Washington, a pretty little town on the shores of enormous Lake Michigan.  This is still the mid-west, but it feels a great deal more sophisticated here, probably because the cities of Milwaukee and Chicago are directly down the coast.  It feels like the East Coast (where NY and Washington, Boston etc) are, so Tony commented that this must be the east coast of the mid-west!  We are here to visit Holley car number 2 tomorrow, in Cedarburg which is nearby.  Then we head back west again, to end up back in Fargo, where we will hand back our car and Betty Lou, our trusty GPS.  After a couple of beers tonight Tony was looking at Betty Lou in a whole new light, so maybe its good we are handing her back soon!!

Tony with the show Holley,
Kanawha, Iowa.

On the way here, we travelled east from the dry expanses of the Badlands of South Dakota through to corn country, Iowa, pushing some high miles for two days in order to get to see the first Holley car in a farm in Kanawha, Iowa.  This place was so small it was on gravel roads, hidden in a mass of corn.  The Holley is owned by a couple who specialise in restoring classic cars for other people.  They do a pretty darn good job of it for their own vehicles as well, as the 'showroom' in which the Holley rests is wallpapered in awards, silver trays, plaques and shelves of trophies for their show cars.  Their Holley is a show car, which means it sits idle except when they trailer it to a car show, where it is driven into the show ring and out again.  It also means it is absolutely immaculate.  However Tony and I had to smile a little, for the car that Tony has built out of nothing is very similar to this original pampered pet, AND Tony still gets to drive his.

Buddy Holly crash site,
Clear Lake, Iowa

Before we'd visited that Holley, we'd been to the site of another Holly - Buddy Holly; actually where his plane crashed just one day after Tony was born.  The plane that Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were in crashed in terrible weather in a cornfield, and the crash site has been turned into a sort of shrine, the info about which we found by accident in the hotel brochure.  We also found out that there were two Frank Lloyd-Wright buildings in the next city over!  Amazing the things we find in small towns.  So we went to see those buildings, too.  It was incredibly hot yesterday - they reckon the heat index stood at 112F, which is 45C!! Way too much like the desert, and we were wandering around outside looking at buildings..but when on holiday you do silly things like that.

Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Then after leaving Mason City we drove on to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a beautiful little town on the banks of the Mississippi River.  First look at the mighty Mississippi, and we even saw a paddle steamer tied up at a dock, which was great.  And lo and behold, in the hotel lobby, we found a brochure for yet another Frank Lloyd Wright house - his own house, Taliesin.  So today we went on a tour of that incredible place.  The house was the scene of 7 murders and 2 fires, so it's had its share of excitement, but now it sits in gentile decay while Lloyd-Wright's remaining disciples and apprentices try and maintain and restore the place before the weather and time takes too much of a toll.

All this traveling means we've stayed in a lot of hotels, but trying to distinguish them is nearly impossible. They are all different hotel chains (Howard Johnson, Super 8, Country Inn, Carlson), but they all have the same room layouts, the bathrooms all look the same, they all have the same facilities, and the breakfasts are the same. Today when we got to breakfast in Prairie du Chien however, we shared the breakfast nook with Amish on holiday! That was something different - I didn't even know they used motorised transport.  All the women were in plain dark dresses and white bonnets, the men had bushy beards and suspenders, and they spoke to each other in some sort of German dialect.  I wonder if they watched TV in their rooms last night...The checkout woman said they were in a van, so maybe it was some sort of Amish convention?? Who knows, but that was just another experience to chalk up to this holiday :)