T&C's Adventures in the T42

( Posted 260608 ) The new (and hopefully current/active)  T&C's 2026 Alaska Trek in the T42  sub-blog is now live! -- 260512 version of this announcement -- Our pathetic inability to keep this blog up to date with our travels has created some interesting organizational challenges.  As we embarked upon our Nevada trip last fall, our dilemma was that we wanted to put new content up while it was still relatively fresh/recent - but also wanted the overall blog to maintain a linear timeline.  We came up with a cumbersome-but-workable solution at the time, but with an additional Arizona trip now also in the rear view mirror that we haven't even begun to document and our new Alaska adventure about to start, the system was clearly going to become untenable. Therefore, we've decided to splinter off into multiple blogs.  This OG blog will continue to be the home of everything up to and including the East of the Rockies Trek (which will eventually get backfilled with t...

(Posted 250926) After a rainy first day hiding out in the Nature Center, we finally got full day of hiking in at Turkey Run State Park - and got to see some pretty unique scenery along the way.

(Posted 250926) Happy Independence Day!

For our next activity, we visited a famous historic home in Springfield.  (No, not the Simpsons' house - a different Springfield than that 😜.)

Since we embarked on our Trek on April 3rd, July 2nd marked the end of our third month on the road. States traversed during month three: 5.

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.

We spent our final day in Wisconsin exploring Devil's Lake State Park.

What exactly is a "dell"?  Other than the fact that a childhood song told us that it's something that a farmer can apparently be in, we had no idea either.  The dictionary defines a dell as "a secluded hollow or small valley, usually covered with trees or turf."  Wikipedia describes the Wisconsin Dells in particular as "a 5-mile gorge on the Wisconsin River...noted for its scenery, in particular for its Cambrian sandstone rock formations and tributary canyons."

Saturday was a day of mini-adventures, as we headed east across Wisconsin.

Today we finished our journey down the St. Croix river, bouncing back and forth between two states, ending at what was once a Little House in the Big Woods.

For the next couple of days, we'll be traveling along the Minnesota / Wisconsin border, bouncing back and forth between the two states to see various sights on both sides.

Voyageurs National Park is the second national park that we visited by boat, since most of the really interesting parts of the park are only accessible by water.

Here's the twelfth in our series of "where we really are now" (or "where we've been more recently") trailers (posted Feb 12).  In late January, our son flew out to join us in the T42 (making it a T43) for a week at the Disney (Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, EPCOT, and Magic Kingdom) and Universal (Studios and Islands of Adventure) theme parks. (P.S. As with the past few trailers, we're working around Blogger's 100 MB file upload limit by linking to a larger video uploaded to YouTube instead.  For the highest quality video viewing experience, you'll probably want to click the little gear icon under the video once it starts playing, and make sure that "Quality" is set to "1080p".)

At Temperance River State Park, we learned that "potholes" aren't just in roads.

We spent Sunday exploring some of the sites around the Grand Portage area.

Today we'd be making what is probably our shortest visit to a National Park ever:  a trip to Isle Royale National Park.  As the name implies, Isle Royale is an island out in Lake Superior just south of the Canadian border and can only be reached by boat.  The only non-overnight boat available only provides 3.5 hours on the island (with a 3 hour round trip to get there and back) so we didn't have time to do very much while there.

We continued our Minnesota adventures with a visit to Tettegouche State Park, on the shores of Lake Superior.

Thursday was a pretty full day, with almost four hours of driving to get to our next stopping place and shopping and sight seeing planned on the way.

Our first, quick foray into Wisconsin was for a visit to Copper Falls State Park.

Our last "stop" on our way out of Michigan was at Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, to do some hiking and waterfall-peeping.