Day Two

There was a tornado warning in Springfield last night. Too bad it didn't hit the Super8 I was at. That thing could have used a good scrubbing.

Things I have learned so far:
Illinois is flat. so flat that rainwater doesn't go anywhere when it rains, which is why they have floods here.
Illinois and southern Wisconsin are covered in fog. literally hundreds of miles of fog. It got weird after a while. I'm out of it now though.

I left Springfield, Il. and drove north to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and straight into Miller Valley. Miller Valley is what the Miller Brewing Company calls the street that runs down the middle of their campus of buildings. I headed straight for the tour center. I started my tour of the brewery at 11:30AM. All tours are free, by the way. They just love you that much at Miller.
So the tour begins with the perfuntory movie/commercial. And with the opening line, I knew I was going to love this tour: "Since the dawn of time, man has longed for one thing... MILLER TIME!" And then the screen explodes in a MTV style montage of suds, sex, and NASCAR. Almost ten minutes go by (it seemed like it) before they actually start to talk about when the company was founded and how the beer is made. The video was more amusing than informative. I think they said and flashed "Miller Time!" on the screen at least a dozen times.
From there, we went to the packaging factory. They have two such factories, and each can produce 1200 bottles a minute, 90,000 cans an hour, and 250,000 cases per day. That's 500,000 cases of beer EVERY DAY from this one location. After that, we saw the Tuns and vats where they ferment the hops and yeast. We saw the shipping warehouse (yawn), the beer caves where Fredrick Miller used to store beer back in the 1800's (that was interesting), and the tasting hall where they gave us free beer.
I have toured the Heiniken Brewery in Amsterdam, and when they gave us a free beer at the end of the tour, it was much better tasting than a store bought beer. At Miller, it wasn't really that different. The High Life was a little better, but not by much. High Life is my beer of choice, by the way.
The whole tour took about an hour and a half. After that, I bought some junk at the gift shop and drove three miles down the road to eat lunch at a place the tour guides had recommended. It was called Saz's. It was OK. They did have Sour Cream and Chives French Fries, which I don't know why someone didn't think of sooner. They were good.
Then it was back in the truck to wear more rubber off the tires. I made it across Wisconsin to a town on the Minnesota border called La Crosse. I am now holed up in a HoJo in La Crosse, and it beats the pants off that Super8 from last night. Actually, I shopped around before bedding down when I got here, and the Super8 here beats the pants off that one in Springfield. The hallway in that thing was 75 yards long and had two lights. looked like a dungeon. I actually slept on top of the bed spread and pulled what remainded of it over me in a sort of inside out blanket.

Tomorrow is almost nothing but driving. This one stretch of I-90 I have to tackle is 657 miles of straightness. However, I have a surprise addition to the trip: The Corn Palace of Mitchell, South Dakota. Americana. That's what road trips are about afterall. I will hopefully hit that tomorrow. Then I will find somewhere to camp between there and Mt. Rushmore. Oh yeah, I decided to add Mt. Rushmore too since it is only a few miles from Crazy Horse.
Tomorrow I am going to camp. I can't afford to keep staying in motels every night for the whole trip, so I am going to rough it. Which means that I might not get to post. I'll have to play that part by ear.
I am just about to get far enough ahead of schedule (I have a tentative schedule) where I can slow down on the driving and find some unique things to look at. local stuff. That's the stuff I like most anyway. Everybody goes to the arch. but not everybody goes to, oh, I don't know, a German Beer Hall in Wisconsin (apparently there are a few). I almost went to a baseball game in La Crosse tonight. I happened upon one. But I was hungry, so I got a Subway sub and came back to the room to write this, and I am now happily watching "Escape From New York" on AMC. If I owned a Cadillac, I would want candelabras on the hood. It would be the epitome of "ghetto fabulous."



Pictures:
















You Tube videos (unedited, so may be crappy in parts):