15th – 19th July 2019
After a nondescript night in our post-Chicago ‘recovery park’ in Union, Illinois (90F, pool, laundry, early night) we began our dash to leave the country. I won’t bore you with the numbers, but due to our extended travels in the USA over the past three years we are in danger of becoming a ping on the radar of the American tax man. Something we can do without. So, to Canada we needed to go, and to give us enough days back in the USA at the end of the trip, we needed to be crossing the border on the 19th of July. By our leisurely travelling standards this involved a veritable picking up of skirts and getting a wiggle on. It was 750 miles to the border from Union and we had given ourselves four driving days to do it. We could easily have done it in two: I said a wiggle not a hustle.
The first of these days took us from Union to Portage, Wisconsin, America’s ‘dairy-land’ state. It produces a lot of milk, and some surprisingly good cheese as we discovered. One of these was based on a Finish cheese in the style of a halloumi. They called it ‘bread cheese’ and marketed as a cheese that, once cooked, could be used for dipping or as a base for some other tasty treat. Only in America… Our cheese of note was a sheep cheese. Does that count as dairy??
Our journey started with a cross country zigzag that seemed to defy the compass until we successfully met up with the interstate highway. We bashed up to our next camp which was at the top of a small ski field hill rather grandly titled Cascade Mountain. The camp was grassy with lots of trees and fairly empty. We had a choice of sites, all fairly uneven and sloped, but after 10 minutes of ‘discussion’, multiple repositionings and the implementation of several levelling blocks we were sorted. It was, surprise, surprise, hot again and we beetled off to the inviting looking pool. This seemed to have be unofficially declared the private domain of a large rowdy family who had settled in for the duration and annexed the whole place. We dunked in a corner at the deep end to cool off, but the shrieking and ‘let’s-make-this-into-a-wave-pool’ game chased us back to chez nous before long.
Day two of our northerly dash took us to a place called Chippewa Falls which is still in Wisconsin. It was the birthplace, in 1925, of Seymour Cray, the father of super computing. The town hosts the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology and boasts an unparalleled collection of Cray Supercomputers, with at least one example of every model. Fantastic random tourist attraction for the nerdy traveller. It was closed whilst we were here. Chippewa Falls also, despite the name, was strangely devoid of any waterfalls to go and look at too. Never mind. We set up and I amused myself with the fun job of draining the tanks and doing a full wash out. Oh, the highs and lows of camping…
Day three and we were on our way to Duluth, Minnesota. We had factored in a two night stop here as we had had spent four days here in June 2017 on our way ‘across the top’ and had loved it. The RV park is in a marina, the summertime sites being the hard standing storage for the boats that are hauled out for the winter. A fantastic duel purposing of space. It also makes for great views and interesting comings and goings, if you like boats, that is. The town is right in the south-west corner of Lake Superior, and is one of the busiest inland ports in the world.
It has an amazing lift bridge that rises numerous times a day to let through all sizes of boats including some 1000ft monsters. Claxons sound, bells ring, traffic is stopped, the whole span rises horizontally, the boats pass, horns are sounded in thanks. It is a cacophony of sound, and happily doesn’t happen much at night as we were parked only 100m away. The town has that vibe that only a waterfront can bring and a cool regenerated area in the warehouse district near the bridge.
This includes a waterfront brewery that we might have found ourselves at a couple of times over the 44 hours that we were here. The waterfront bike/walking trail that had been so lovely on our last visit was a shadow of its former self and it transpires that later in 2017 it was savaged by two separate storms, ripping up the boardwalk and walkways. Again, when passing through a place like this on a warm, sunny, benign summer’s day it is easy to forget that winters can be brutal in this neck of the woods. Other things achieved here? I got a great haircut which was also remarkably cheap, two qualities oft not associated with each other. We broke out the bikes and cycled down the narrow peninsula near us to find a beach for a dip in Lake Superior, which was surprisingly warm. As we were sat on the fairly narrow beach two policemen came past on quad bikes, patrolling for bad behaviour and alcohol. All jobs have ‘the rough and the smooth’ I imagine for a cop in the USA, it doesn’t get much smoother than that.
After Duluth it was the last stretch before the border. On the way we procured an oil change for Big D and arrived at the border town of International Falls, Minnesota at lunchtime in the pouring rain. Was this the USA mourning our departure…?? We ate our picnic lunch in a petrol station carpark (all class, I know) and then, fortified, headed to the border. The border between the USofA and Canada is the longest land border in the world, don’t you know. Here it is demarcated by the River Rainy, over which there is a toll bridge, just to extract those last few US dollars before you leave. On the Canadian side of the river the road arrives in the back-blocks of a factory complex which I think is actually a paper mill and the short queue of vehicles wound its way around the buildings until we got to the immigration/customs booths. No so much a grand gateway border crossing, more of the cat flap variety. It was very informal with no paperwork to complete. Did we have any merchendise? No. Booze? Yes (A trifle more than we declared.) Cannabis products? No. Guns? No. Where did we live and when were we leaving to go there? Tricky. We stuck with NZ, given that we are travelling on those passports, leaving to go back to the USA in 8 weeks. (Immigration officers get a bit suspicious about the homeless and we didn’t even mention our joblessness.) We were granted admission and were instantly coughed out onto a street in Fort Frances, the town on the Canadian side. It was still raining and we were in, but more importantly, we were out of the USA.
