Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin

These giant turbines sprinkled across the corn fields were not here the last time we came through the Midwest. I remember the corn, though. We have a few wind farms in Pennsylvania and I have biked past some of them on the GAP. I pay extra for wind powered energy, mostly because it seems better than coal. But seeing them stretched out to the horizon like this really hits home how much we change the landscape with our choices.

"It's just corn and floods," Marko said. He was balking at writing anything in his journal. We ended up covering quite a long distance these past two days. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and now Wisconsin. He's not wrong, it's incredible how much corn is out here. 

M picked Wyalusing State Park because it seemed like it was in the right direction. It sits on these bluffs above where the Wisconsin River flows into the Mississippi. We took the interstate part of the way, and then got off on a series of two lane roads that wound through more corn fields. We pulled over to a cheese store for curds, or squeaky cheese as the kids called it. M also bought a giant foam cheese hat for the kids. We got here before sunset and it wasn't raining so already an improvement over the previous day's travels.

The park turned out to be full of things to do. A decent cell signal meant M had no trouble working. There were plenty of hiking/running trails. There are all these effigy mounds in the shapes of bears and birds around here and the kids were happy to hike around and look at them. The hardwood forest here is filled with nut trees. Hickory and walnuts and acorns were all over the place. We also went looking for our first geocache, which unfortunately was hidden in the burned out trunk of a tree and Max got so sooty he demanded a bath, which is saying a lot.

Oh, by the way, we're on a road trip. I'm homeschooling the kids and M is working remotely. More about that later, but I thought I better get started logging our journey before I forgot. 

State parks often have really late checkouts. This one is 3pm, so we'll hang out here for most of the day tomorrow. M will work and we'll probably play some tennis and go on some more hikes. The kids got these pretty cool workbooks from the ranger with all sorts of scavenger hunts and activities to do outside. Then we'll try some late day driving and see where we end up. When we went through Ohio, the turnpike rest areas actually had a dump station and electric hookups for RVs, so we might try to find something like that.