John A. Travels to California

September 9: Day Two

Capital building in Madison, Wisconsin

Day two started on a rather sour note as we were both exhausted from having a miserable sleep.  I’d also managed to toss and turn so much that I developed a headache that lasted the entire day.  We brewed the coffee in our hotel room, and hit the road around 7:00.
The GPS showed Madison, Wisconsin, about an hour up I- 94, so this is where we decided to stop for breakfast.  Our idea was to get a big breakfast and then drive the entire day until supper time.  The only problem was that it was Sunday morning, and nothing was open.  We drove down the main street until we got to the capitol building.  It looked like a huge dome similar to Washington, D.C.,  so I took a few pictures.  We finally found a restaurant on the GPS and pulled into a parking lot.
When we got out of the car, we heard loud speakers just down the road.  There appeared to be a large sporting event in progress.  It turned out to be the iron-man contest where people swim, bicycle, and run a marathon all in one day.  We asked where a good restaurant would be, and found a wonderful place just across the road.  They served a huge breakfast, and were very friendly.

Come Back In Resturant in Madison

The previous day when I unplugged my inverter, I managed to short out the cigarette lighter.  Without any power, our computer was almost out of battery power.  They let us put it into the wall socket in the restaurant.  This turned out to be very valuable, and allowed us to get back onto the highway.  After a wonderful breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes, we hit the road.
Around 10:15, we pulled into the next city called Wisconsin Dells in order to look for a church to attend for the Sunday morning service.  We stopped at a motel and grabbed the telephone book.  We plugged the street name into the GPS which said we had to travel about two miles south.  It turned out that the street name was a street rather than the road, and so we were two miles in the wrong direction.  We turned around to go to the other street, but it turned out there was a DO NOT ENTER sign, and ended up doubling back towards home on I -94 south.  At this point, we were

Iron Man event in Madison

already half-an-hour late for the service, and Ronald said that we might as well forget it.  Perhaps the Lord was telling us that the pastor was no good anyway.  And so it was back onto the highway in the right direction and on down the road.

As we started cruising through open countryside, Ronald started to get a bit tired.  At one point, he wavered slightly, so pulled over immediately as he was getting too sleepy.  We had been looking for a restroom for an hour and had not been able to find one, so we walked over to the fence line and one of the bushes.
I took over driving, and things went very well for about the next six hours.  We were able to stop at an old gas station and pick up a fuse, locating the fuse box under the hood.  I find that Ronald’s Mercedes-Benz is a very well built vehicle with an excellent owner’s Manual.  Now that we had power again, life was good.
We planned to stop in Sioux Falls for supper, but managed to miss the off-ramp, and so tried to turn around.  However, there was construction, and we were 5 miles out of town before we had the opportunity to get off the highway.  Talk about frustrating!  Once we got off the highway, we saw a sign about a pizza ranch.  It turned out to be a buffet with fried chicken and pizza, and it was delicious.  We also raided the salad bar, and came away feeling very satisfied.

We were both feeling quite good by that time, and so I decided to push on.  We drove all the way to Chamberlain, South Dakota.  Chamberlain is located near a large river called Lake Francis.  We were able to spot where the hotels were by using the GPS well in advance.  We ended up in the Super Eight motel for $70.00 for a double bedroom.  Not a bad deal.

Windmills all along the highway

I turned my laptop on again and found the Wireless Service and connected.  Then I launched Internet Explorer, hoping to finally be able to surf the Internet and check my e-mail.  But no such luck.  The old sign came up:  page cannot be displayed.  For the next hour, I got on the phone,  talked to the front desk clerk, and did everything I could think of to get the computer online.  But nothing would work.  The people at Hewlett Packard said everything should work, and they didn’t support public networks.  I finally told Ronald to go ahead and go swimming while I kept working on the problem.  After he came back from a refreshing swim at 10:00, I was still at it, and starting to pull out my hair.  (Now you know why I have no hair!)  Finally I told the Hewlett Packard people, Thanks for nothing,  jumped in the shower and went to bed.
That day we had traveled 1085 kilometres, and were quite proud of ourselves.