Traveling from Wisconsin to Illinois [240702]

Tuesday was mostly a travel day, although we made a number of stops along the way to pick up supplies since we weren't sure what would be open/available along our route on the upcoming 4th of July holiday.  But we took the chance to sample a frozen treat along the way too.

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It started raining in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, with the trees above concentrating the raindrops into heavy hitting clunking thumps on and off for hours.  We woke up for good just before 8 and rushed off to the showers during a relative lull in the rain.  After our morning routine, we did a dump and fill in a light rain before leaving Devil's Lake for good.

Our route took us 92 miles south-ish for some shopping.  Our first stop was at a Menards, where we thought we’d buy some inexpensive parts to augment the new window screens.  While their rolls of fiberglass screen material were the cheapest around, the standard mesh was comparatively much larger than mosquito netting so we decided to wait and look at the netting at Walmart first.  Their price for caulk and drop cloths were also more than Walmart, so we ended up buying nothing there.

Next up (after gas) was Dollar Tree.  As is often the case, they didn’t have some of the typical Dollar Tree items that we actually went there for (more plastic baskets that Christine wanted to use around the bed, some coffee cakes Tom wanted to try, nor black vinyl), but did have other things that were "on our list" (like the mini spray bottles we had been looking for, and the breakfast biscuits Tom likes to snack on while driving) as well as various other things we weren't explicitly looking for there.

We stopped next door at Culvers for “Wisconsin Frozen Custard” (another item on our list of "regional cuisine" to try) and bought a chocolate/vanilla two scoop bowl.  To us, it tasted exactly like buffet soft-serve ice cream.

After an Aldi run, we continued southward for another 181 miles (crossing back into Illinois just after 3:30 p.m. along the way) . . .

. . .  arriving in Lincoln, IL around 7 p.m.  A quick stop at Dollar Tree (yes, the second one of the day) netted us the missing baskets and coffee cakes, before our arrival at our resting place for the night:  Walmart (lucky #13, for those of you keeping track).

After yet another shopping trip into Walmart, we had a dinner of pasta, broccoli, and edamame.  The rest of the evening was spent finishing work on and publishing the South Dakota, Part 7 blog post before finally heading to bed around 11:30 p.m.  Happily, tomorrow's plans didn't call for a super-early wake-up time.

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